Three apartment units were damaged and one family was displaced after a transformer exploded and caught fire at an apartment complex in Santa Monica on Thursday evening.

The incident was reported around 10:46 p.m. at the apartment complex at 850 2nd St., according to Deputy Santa Monica Fire Chief Tom Clemo.

When firefighters arrived at the location they saw heavy fire and smoke on the third floor of the building.

Witnesses told firefigthers that they heard a loud explosion before the fire.

Dozens of residents were evacuated from the building. At least one of them suffered mild smoke inhalation, Clemo said.

Fire agencies from Beverly Hills, Culver City and Los Angeles assisted with service calls in Santa Monica while firefighters battled the apartment fire.

Clemo said firefighters knocked out the flames around 11:28 p.m. The estimated damage caused by the blaze was not imediately known. But the fire destroyed one apartment unit, displacing a family, Clemo said. Two other apartments suffered smoke and water damage.

The blaze also took out power lines, Clemo said.

Residents from the damaged units were able to stay with family members in the area for the night, Clemo said, adding that the Red Cross would be assisting the family that was displaced.

The cause of the fire remained under investigation.

——

enter their home Friday morning after a transformer explosion damaged a Santa Monica apartment complex and left one person injured Thursday night, police said.

The apartment building in the 800 block of Ocean Boulevard erupted into flames around 10:45 p.m. after a transformer blew, according to the Santa Monica Police Department. The blaze was knocked down just before 11:30 p.m.

The top floor of the apartment complex was red tagged and residents were not able to enter their home as of 5 a.m. Friday as crews worked to clean up fire, smoke and water damage.

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A witness reported hearing a loud pop and seeing fireballs when the fire broke out.

“I thought a bomb went off,” witness Alicia told NBC4. “The fire plumes were huge. It’s smoking like crazy.”

One woman suffered smoke inhalation. At least four apartments were damaged, police said.

Earlier reports suggested the explosion was at the Oceana Beach Club Hotel, but police later clarified the apartment building was near the hotel.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

A reenactment of satanic rituals known as a “black mass” that had been scheduled for Monday evening on the Harvard campus was abruptly canceled amid a chorus of condemnation from Catholic groups and university officials and students.

However, a scaled-down version of the event, without the original sponsorship of the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club, was apparently held late Monday by members of the New York-based Satanic Temple off campus, at the Hong Kong lounge in Harvard Square.

Lucien Greaves, a temple spokesman, said in an e-mail at 10:35 p.m. that the mass was “happening now” at the Hong Kong. He did not say how many people were participating or provide specifics on what was happening.A lounge employee, who would only identify himself as Fred, said in a phone interview that temple members were drinking at the bar, but he did not believe they were performing any rituals.

“I haven’t heard any complaining,” he said.

Earlier in the evening, Greaves told the Globe that the mass was canceled because organizers no longer had a venue.

“Everyone involved, outside of the Satanic Temple, got really scared,” Greaves said. “And I don’t necessarily blame them, because I understand that they were getting a lot of vitriolic hate mail, and I don’t think they expected it.”

Earlier Monday, the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club had decided to move the mass off campus.

“The Harvard Extension School is grateful the student group has recognized the strong concerns expressed by members of the Harvard community and beyond,” Robert Neugeboren, dean of students and alumni affairs at the extension school, said after the decision was ade to find a new location.

In a statement later Monday evening, the cultural studies club said it was no longer sponsoring the mass after plans to hold it at the Middle East club in Central Square in Cambridge fell through.

The cultural studies club did not respond to an inquiry asking why it had decided to move the mass.

“The Satanic Temple has informed us that they will stage their own black mass ceremony at an undisclosed private location to ‘reaffirm their respect for the Satanic faith and to demonstrate that the most powerful response to offensive speech is to shame those who marginalize others by letting their own words and actions speak for themselves,’ ” the studies club said.

The initial plan to hold a black mass on the Harvard campus prompted widespread outrage.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston held a eucharistic procession that began at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology chapel in Cambridge Monday evening, followed by a holy hour at St. Paul Church in Harvard Square.

Jon Swedberg, 64, of Taunton and a marcher in the procession, said he was strongly opposed to the black mass and that he wanted to “pray to the Blessed Father on behalf of what’s happening.”

“I find [the black mass] offensive as a Catholic,” he said. “I find it goes directly against the faith of my church, the faith of the church of my choice.”

Hundreds of marchers proceeded from MIT to St. Paul Church for the holy hour, clutching rosary beads, crosses, and pictures of Jesus.

More than 1,500 people packed the church for the holy hour, including Drew Faust, Harvard president.

“Tonight, my friends, we gather in this moment of prayer, as a parish, a university community, to celebrate the greatest gift that God has ever extended to us, His son Jesus Christ,” said the Rev. Michael E. Drea, who led the holy hour prayers.

He said people of faith “all recognize the message of the Satanic black mass, they recognize it for what it is: an act of hatred . . . for the Catholic church.”

Dani Mellen, 25, of Jamaica Plain, sat across the street from the church and said that she had wanted to attend the black mass. She said that she is not a satanist, but was curious to see how the black mass worked.

“I understand it was supposed to be a reenactment of what a satanic mass would have been,” she said. “I’m not totally sure, because I’ve never attended one, but I was excited to because I have a thirst for knowledge.”

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley and Faust had been at odds over the university’s initial decision to allow the reenactment on campus.

O’Malley said the event was disturbing. The satanic ritual is believed by critics to mock the Roman Catholic religion.

“Why people would want to do something that is so offensive to so many people in the community, whether they’re Catholic or not, it’s very repugnant,” O’Malley said in an interview with the Globe.

In a statement released earlier Monday, Faust said the performance would be allowed on campus.

She called the student group’s sponsorship of the black mass “abhorrent,” but said she must protect the group’s right to free speech.

“Vigorous and open discussion and debate are essential to the pursuit of knowledge, and we must uphold these values even in the face of controversy,” Faust said.

Nearly 60,000 students, alumni, and faculty members signed a petition against holding the services on campus, according to a statement released by Harvard Rhodes scholar Aurora Griffin.

“I am ashamed that my university is allowing such a hateful event to happen under the auspices of ‘education,’ ” said Griffin, a former president of the Harvard Catholic Student Association.

The Harvard Extension club has continuously urged critics to widen their understanding of satanic worship. In an interview via e-mail Friday, an unidentified spokesperson said the event was meant to be educational, not offensive.

The spokesperson asserted that many satanists are animal rights activists, vegetarians, and artists with a strong sense of community.

via Controversial ‘black mass’ slated for Harvard is called off – Metro – The Boston Globe.

Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston

They’re playing Devil’s advocate.

The New York-based Satanic Temple will be staging a black mass on Harvard University’s main campus next Monday — and the thought of calling demons into being has the Church all riled up.

Perhaps that’s the point.

The black mass is an inversion of the traditional Catholic Mass that medieval people associated with witches. The witches were accused of stealing a consecrated piece of Communion bread for the mass and worshipping the Devil.

However, there’s little evidence that the specter of black masses was anything more than myth that was used by people in power to justify witch hunts and trials.

Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves says his group contacted the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club to organize a re-enactment of a black mass based on the imaginings of French writer Joris-Karl Huysman in the novel “La-bas.” Huysman wrote the novel during the French Occult Revival of the 1800s.

Greaves says next week’s black mass at Harvard’s Queen’s Head Pub is meant to be educational. Members of the Satanic Temple don’t have anything diabolical planned — the group is not planning to use a consecrated host or provoke the spirit world. In fact, Greaves says he is an atheist.
“This is not a supernatural ritual,” Greaves told the Daily News. “We don’t believe in the supernatural. And I don’t think belief in the supernatural should give you any privilege, since any deeply held belief should be protected.”
This makes The Satanic Temple’s activities more of a political statement than a cohesive religious ritual — in other words, closer in theology to the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster than the Church of Satan.
Still, the Devil is essential.
“There’s no stronger cultural symbol for the revolt against the general idea of arbitrary authority and revolt against ultimate tyranny,” Greaves said of Satan. “There’s no better a construct that can act as a narrative for our works and goals.”
All this talk about Satan has spooked the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston issued a statement blasting the Satanists’ scheduled demonstration and announced plans to conduct a “Holy Hour” during the same time at a nearby church.
“For the good of the Catholic faithful and all people, the Church provides clear teaching concerning Satanic worship,” the statement read. “This activity separates people from God and the human community, it is contrary to charity and goodness, and it places participants dangerously close to destructive works of evil.”
But the show will go on. Harvard University emphasized that they do not endorse the view of the Cultural Studies Club. Still, the school said in a statement that they supported the rights of the students to assemble freely.
As part of a series exploring different cultures, the Cultural Studies Club is also hosting a Shinto tea ceremony, a Shaker exhibition and a Buddhist presentation on meditation.
The Satanic Temple, on the other hand, has been actively involved in the church-state debate in the past. Currently, the group is trying to plant a monument to Satan at the Oklahoma Capitol as an alternative to a Ten Commandments monument that has been there since 2012.

via Satanists slated to perform ‘black mass’ at Harvard University claim they don’t believe in the supernatural – NY Daily News.

Government officials, reacting to the growing voice of conservative news outlets, especially on the internet, are angling to curtail the media’s exemption from federal election laws governing political organizations, a potentially chilling intervention that the chairman of the Federal Election Commission is vowing to fight.

“I think that there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers,” warned Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee E. Goodman in an interview.

“The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the internet, and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and internet communications,” he added.

Noting the success of sites like the Drudge Report, Goodman said that protecting conservative media, especially those on the internet, “matters to me because I see the future going to the democratization of media largely through the internet. They can compete with the big boys now, and I have seen storm clouds that the second you start to regulate them, there is at least the possibility or indeed proclivity for selective enforcement, so we need to keep the media free and the internet free.”

All media has long benefited from an exemption from FEC rules, thereby allowing outlets to pick favorites in elections and promote them without any limits or disclosure requirements like political action committees.

But Goodman cited several examples where the FEC has considered regulating conservative media, including Sean Hannity’s radio show and Citizens United’s movie division. Those efforts to lift the media exemption died in split votes at the politically evenly divided board, often with Democrats seeking regulation.

Liberals over the years have also pushed for a change in the Federal Communications Commission’s “fairness doctrine” to cut of conservative voices, and retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has delighted Democrats recently with a proposed Constitutional amendment that some say could force the media to stop endorsing candidates or promoting issues.

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Are you part of the Global Warming Religion?

By ANDREW DeMILLO and CHRISTINA HUYNH

VILONIA, Ark. (AP) — Emergency officials were searching for survivors Monday in the debris left by a powerful tornado that carved an 80-mile path of destruction through suburban Little Rock, killing at least 16 people.
The tornado that slammed into Vilonia, about 10 miles west of the state capital, on Sunday evening grew to about half a mile wide and was among a rash of tornadoes and heavy storms that rumbled across the center and south of the country overnight. The National Weather Service warned that more tornadoes, damaging winds and very large hail would strike in parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana on Monday.
“We’ve got a powerful storm system affecting the eastern two-thirds of the United States over the next few days,” said Russell Schneider, director of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.
Brandon Morris, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, said crews were sifting through the rubble in the hope of uncovering survivors and to assess the full extent of the destruction.

“Right now, the main focus is life safety,” Morris said. “We’re trying to make sure everyone is accounted for.”
Karla Ault, a Vilonia High School volleyball coach, said she sheltered in the school gymnasium as the storm approached. After it passed, her husband told her their home was reduced to the slab on which it had sat.

“I’m just kind of numb. It’s just shock that you lost everything. You don’t understand everything you have until you realize that all I’ve got now is just what I have on,” Ault said.

A meteorologist with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock said he was virtually certain the storm that hit Vilonia and nearby Mayflower would be rated as the nation’s strongest twister to date this year.
“It has the potential to be EF3 or greater,” meteorologist Jeff Hood said. EF3 storms have winds greater than 136 mph. “Based on some of the footage we’ve seen from Mayflower and where it crossed Interstate 40, things were wrecked in a very significant way.”

He said officials are also looking at the environmental impact. “Making sure utilities are cut off in the area. We don’t want anything to get, any fires to start or anything like that.”

Another twister killed a person in Quapaw, Okla., before crossing into Kansas to the north and destroying more than 100 homes and businesses, and injuring 25 people in the city of Baxter Springs, according to authorities in Kansas. A suspected tornado struck near Plain Dealing in northwest Louisiana.

The overall death toll stood at 17 early Monday.

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The disappearance of four members of a patent semiconductor traveling on Malaysia Airlines MH370 makes the famous billionaire Jacob Rothschild at the sole owner of the important patent.
———————-
Editor’s note:
With the announcement by the Malaysian authorities that flight MH 370 fell into the South Indian Ocean SW of Perth in Australia and all on board must be regarded as dead J.Rothschild has now become the patent holder.

The disappearance of four members of a patent semiconductor traveling on Malaysia Airlines MH370 makes the famous billionaire Jacob Rothschild at the sole owner of the important patent.
The mystery surrounding the Malaysian Airlines MH-370 is growing as each day passes with more mysterious silence shadowing the disappearance of the airline. More and more conspiracy theories are beginning to boom on the internet. One of the conspiracies one is the Freescale Semiconductor’s ARM microcontroller ‘KL-03? which is a new improvised version of an older microcontroller KL-02. This crazy story about how Illuminati Rothschild exploited the airlines to gain full Patent Rights of an incredible KL-03 micro-chip is going haywire across the internet especially when it’s involving Jacob Rothschild as the evil master plotter.
A US technology company which had 20 senior staff on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had just launched a new electronic warfare gadget for military radar systems in the days before the Boeing 777 went missing.

Freescale Semiconductor has been developing microprocessors, sensors and other technology for the past 50 years. The technology it creates is commonly referred to as embedded processors, which according to the firm are “stand-alone semiconductors that perform dedicated computing functions in electronic systems”.
Why were so many Freescale employees traveling together? What were their jobs. Were they on a mission and if so what was this mission? Can these employees be the cause of the disappearance of this plane? Could the plane have been then hijacked and these people kidnapped? Did these employees hold valuable information, did they have any valuable cargo with them? Did they know company and technological secrets? With all the might of technology why cant this plane be located? Where is this plane where are these people?”
The 20 Freescale employees, among 239 people on flight MH370, were mostly engineers and other experts working to make the company’s chip facilities in Tianjin, China, and Kuala Lumpur more efficient, said Mitch Haws, vice president, global communications and investor relations.
“These were people with a lot of experience and technical background and they were very important people,” Haws said. “It’s definitely a loss for the company.”
In Malaysia, Freescale’s modern operations facility that manufactures and tests integrated circuits (IC) is based in Petaling Jaya. Based on information obtained from Freescale’s website, the facility began operations in 1972 covering an eight hectare site and is specifically designed for the manufacturing and testing of microprocessors, digital signal processors and integrated radio frequency circuits. It also owns Freescale RF which is involved in creating solutions for Aerospace and Defence listed below.

1. Battlefield communication
2. Avionics
3. HF Radar – Band L- and S-
4. Missile Guidance
5. Electronic Warfare
6. Identification, friend or foe (IFF)
Freescale’s shareholders include the Carlyle Group of private equity investors whose past advisers have included ex-US president George Bush Sr and former British Prime Minister John Major. Carlyle’s previous heavyweight clients include the Saudi Binladin Group, the construction firm owned by the family of Osama bin Laden.
The fact that Freescale had so many highly qualified staff on board the Boeing 777 had already prompted wild conspiracy theories about what might have happened. The company says they were flying to China to improve its consumer products operations, but Freescale’s fresh links to electronic warfare technology is likely to trigger more speculation and deepen the mystery.
Experts have been baffled how a large passenger jet seems to have flown undetected and possibly beaten military radar systems for up to six hours. Avoiding radar via “cloaking technology” has long been one of the objectives of the defense industry and Freescale has been active developing chips for military radar.

On its website, the company says its radio frequency products meet the requirements for applications in “avionics, radar, communications, missile guidance, electronic warfare and identification friend or foe”. Last June it announced it was creating a team of specialists dedicated to producing “radio frequency power products” for the defense industry. And on March 3, it announced it was releasing 11 of these new gadgets for use in “high frequency, VHF and low-band UHF radar and radio communications”.
The company did not respond to questions from Express Online, including whether any of its missing employees had been working on the defense products. It neither provided any responses to the latest bizarre conspiracy theory being widely published on the comments sections of newspaper websites and other internet forums.
The comment reads: “It reads: “Have you pieced together the puzzle of missing flight 370 to Beijing China? If not, here are your missing pieces.
Four days after the flight MH370 disappear, semiconductor patent was approved by the U.S. patent office patent is divided in parts of 20% between five starters. One of the owners is the company itself, Freescale Semiconductor, Austin, Texas (USA), and the other four Chinese employees of the company: Peidong Wang, Zhijun Chen, Cheng and Li Ying Zhijong, all the Suzhou City. And they all passengers of Malaysia Airlines plane disappeared on March 8, according Eternity .
Patent holders can alter the proceeds legally by passing wealth to their heirs. “However, they cannot do so until the Patent is approved. So when the plane went missing, the patent had not been approved.”

However, the absurd theory does not add up.
Although a Freescale patent does exist under number US8650327, none of the names listed actually appear on the passenger manifest released by the Malaysian authorities. ( But maybe the names have been removed from the flight manifest)
If the patent holder dies, the other owners share equally in dividends from the deceased. If four of the five patentees die, then the patentee left alive gets 100% of the patent. That remaining patent holder is the company Freescale Semiconductor. Who owns Freescale Semiconductor? The answer is: Jacob Rothschild. British billionaire owns the company Blackstone, which in turn owns the company Freescale Semiconductors. Several speculations on the Internet now pay attention to this circumstance. The Rothschilds are a dynasty of financiers and international bankers of German-Jewish origin . The family is from the nineteenth century one of the most influential families of bankers and financiers of Europe.
The search continues for Flight MH370 but speculation surrounding its fate grows by the day.

Source:
www.express.co.uk
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For the first 4/20 ever, people will gather in Colorado this weekend to show support for fully legal marijuana. Just months after the state opened its doors to recreational pot, crowds will head to events on Sunday like the sold-out Cannabis Cup, all to celebrate a plant that brought Colorado $14 million in taxed sales in January alone. Colorado’s example has served as a promising sign that legal marijuana can be a strong source of income for other states interested in scaling back harsh anti-pot laws and listening to voters, who have increasingly shown support for legalizing marijuana.

(Scroll down to see if your state is likely to be one of the next to legalize.)

Taxed and regulated marijuana is coming soon to Washington state, which along with Colorado passed a legalization measure at the polls during the 2012 general election. And with Attorney General Eric Holder now willing to admit that he is at least “cautiously optimistic” about the groundbreaking laws, marijuana policy reformers in other states are looking more intently at the best way to proceed.

The momentum is on marijuana’s side. It has the forces of capitalism behind it — one study has predicted that the industry could do as much as $8 billion in annual sales by 2018, and there are some signs that the federal government may be ready to help normalize the marijuana business. Legalization is also becoming widely accepted as a social justice issue. Advocates have become increasingly vocal, arguing that it makes no sense to continue treating pot as a Schedule I substance, considered by federal authorities alongside heroin and LSD. In a drug war-obsessed nation that already incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other in the world, around 750,000 people are arrested for marijuana each year, with more than 650,000 of them for possession alone.

For opponents who believe marijuana is damaging to the mind and body, these stats appear to be of less importance.

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World leaders and Jewish groups condemned a leaflet handed out in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk in which Jews were told to “register” with the pro-Russian militants who have taken over a government office in an attempt to make Ukraine part of Russia, according to Ukrainian and Israeli media.

Jews emerging from a synagogue say they were handed leaflets that ordered the city’s Jews to provide a list of property they own and pay a registration fee “or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportation and see their assets confiscated,” reported Ynet News, Israel’s largest news website, and Ukraine’s Donbass news agency.

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