Although swarms are pretty common around here, this is the biggest one in Hood for a few years. On average, 0 to 3 earthquakes within 10 km of the volcano are recorded each week. Officials say the tremors have been occurring along a fault three miles deep on the south of the volcano. Although the cause of this swarm is still unknown, a series of earthquakes tends to happen on volcanoes as magma and gases navigate beneath the surface.

Mount Hood is a potentially active volcano, the highest peak in Oregon State and sits 75 km ESE of Portland in the Cascade Volcanic Arc of northern Oregon. In the last 1,500 years, Mount Hood has had two major eruptive periods that produced lava domes, pyroclastic flows and mud flows, and minor ash fallout. The most recent major eruptive period began in 1780 and lasted for one to two decades.

The video clip begins with a white student grappling over whether or not to look a person of color in the eyes when he walks past them, whether him crossing the street if he sees a gang of black people ahead will offend them, and whether he should then explain to them why he crossed the street. "There's all of this stuff wrapped up in how we meet or do not meet each other's eyes," states the main speaker. Laughing at Liberals sums up the sheer idiocy of this exchange;

"When you pass a person of color on the street, do you give them the 'white guy smile'? Congratulations, you're racist! If you look at a person of color, you're racist. If you don't look at them, you're racist. If you sort of look at them, then look away, you're still racist. If you keep looking at them, well, damn you, you racist!"

This is yet another illustration of the lunacy of white guilt. So indoctrinated are the students in the narrative that they should make apologies for their skin color, any kind of behavior whatsoever is never enough to atone for their sins. They're even unsure as to whether smiling at someone is offensive.

And what exactly are their sins? As we have documented, white people were victims of the slave trade too, Muslims were far more brutal towards African slaves and white people ended the slave trade at great cost to their own race. There is nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about, but flaunting your white guilt is the ultimate act of virtue signalling, so don't expect the trendies to stop doing it any time soon.

A new IMF proposal shared with Europe late last week goes far beyond what Greece’s eurozone creditors, led by Germany, have said they are willing to do to help the country regain its financial health. Germany is leading the pressure on the IMF to dilute its demands and rejoin the Greek bailout program as a lender.

The IMF wants eurozone countries to accept long delays in the repayment of Greece’s bailout loans, which would fall due in the period from 2040 to 2080 under the proposal, according to officials familiar with the talks.

Greece is entering the seventh year of its troubled bailout still struggling to begin a recovery. The country has largely closed the gaping budget deficit that triggered its debt crisis. But the IMF-European bailout — including austerity measures that in total have amounted to more than 30% of GDP so far — contributed to a 25% decline in the country’s economic output since before the debt crisis.

“People in houses will be hurt by [the] shaking and then a tsunami coming,” says Mr Kawata, an earthquake expert and professor of safety science at Kansai University. Hundreds of thousands of people could die. This is not an alarmist message from a university professor but the Japanese government’s official worst case scenario for a disaster it considers highly likely to occur within the next 30 years: an earthquake of between 8.0 and 9.0 magnitude in the tectonic plate boundary called the Nankai Trough.

The country’s precarious seismology is simple to understand. It sits at the boundary of four tectonic plates, shot through with faults like crazy paving. Those plate boundaries give rise to “megathrust” earthquakes in the seas off Japan’s Pacific coast such as the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake in March 2011. In the western part of Japan, the plate boundary is marked by an underwater trench called the Nankai Trough. The Sagami Trough runs further east, facing Tokyo.

A large earthquake has struck the Nankai Trough every 100 to 150 years. The trough is split into three main sections, known, from west to east, as Nankai, Tonankai and Tokai; quakes hit the two easterly sections in the mid-1940s, but the Tokai section has been quiet for 158 years. That long and ominous silence has made a Tokai earthquake the most feared and anticipated in Japan.

The US and Soviet militaries learned first-hand of the potential consequences of a major EMP event when conducting high altitude nuclear tests over 50 years ago. In 1962 for example, a US military exercise dubbed “Operation Starfish” exploded a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead 240 miles above Johnson Island in the Pacific Ocean. Alarmingly, the resulting EMP field caused street lights to blow out and affected telephone and radio communications in Hawaii, 900 miles away.

Fearing its use as a “first strike” weapon that would take out critical military command and control infrastructure, both superpowers spent the following decades hardening their military apparatus against such an attack. Our civilian infrastructure, however, has remained largely unshielded from severe electromagnetic events. Much of the knowledge on the effects of EMPs has been classified due to its national security implications. Over time, knowledge of the threat from an EMP has made its way into the public consciousness.

Senator Pat Roberts, Republican for Kansas, relinquished an eight-month hold he said was unrelated to Fanning’s qualifications or his sexuality. Roberts sought assurances from the Obama administration that detainees at the military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison would not be relocated to Kansas, and he announced on the Senate floor Tuesday he received them.

The landmark move was praised by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organization. His nomination comes five years after the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation barring openly gay people from serving.

"Eric Fanning's historic confirmation today as Secretary of the US Army is a demonstration of the continued progress towards fairness and equality in our nation’s armed forces," HRC President Chad Griffin said in a statement. "Eric Fanning has spent his career serving this nation with tireless dedication, skill and ability, and as secretary he will bring that same commitment to the men and women of the US Army."

Most individuals and many transgender people use female or male pronouns and titles. Some transgender and gender non-conforming people prefer to use pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers, such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir [Footnote: Ze and hir are popular gender-free pronouns preferred by some transgender and/or gender non-conforming individuals].

So people can basically force us — on pain of massive legal liability — to say what they want us to say, whether or not we want to endorse the political message associated with that term, and whether or not we think it’s a lie.

We have to use “ze,” a made-up word that carries an obvious political connotation (endorsement of the “non-binary” view of gender). We have to call people “him” and “her” even if we believe that people’s genders are determined by their biological sex and not by their self-perceptions — perceptions that, by the way, can rapidly change, for those who are “gender-fluid” — and that using terms tied to self-perception is basically a lie.

This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.

A study published by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) earlier this month indicates that roughly 28 percent of American bee colonies were lost just this past winter. More shockingly, the same report shows that nearly half of all bee colonies in the US, 44 percent, were devastated over the past year. Despite annual statistics only having been collected for the past six years, current research is showing that bee colonies are failing even during the summer months — a time when colony health is expected.

Unfortunately, the problem is not limited to the US. In the UK, losses of honeybees in the winter of 2014 to 2015, the last year statistics are available, surpassed 14 percent, a number that did not confirm previous findings which seemed to suggest honeybee populations were stabilizing.

Mr Johnson said: "This is the biggest stitch up since the Bayeux Tapestry. It stinks to high heaven. FTSE 100 chiefs are seeing their pay packets soar while uncontrolled immigration is forcing down wages for British workers. Now we learn that some fat cats have been secretly agreeing to campaign for remain while angling for lavish Government contracts. It makes us look like a banana republic."

"And it is also now beyond doubt that the so called renegotiation was a fiction designed to bamboozle the public. It was a meaningless mime, a ritual, a kabuki drama in which the outcome was utterly preordained. This is not the far-reaching and fundamental reform we were promised."

Sadly, this is what the endgame of socialism looks like. When an all-powerful government is elevated far above all other institutions in society and radical leftists are given the keys to the kingdom, this is the result. Food shortages, looting and rampant violent crime have all become part of daily life in Venezuela, and we all need to watch as this unfolds very carefully, because similar scenarios will soon be playing out all over the planet.

The funny thing is that Venezuela actually has more “wealth” than most countries in the world. According to the CIA, Venezuela actually has more proven oil reserves than anyone else on the globe – including Saudi Arabia. So how did such a wealthy nation find itself plunged into full-blown economic collapse so rapidly, and could a similar thing happen to us?

We are sitting on the largest mountain of debt in the history of the planet, and our debt-fueled prosperity is completely dependent on the rest of the world lending us gigantic amounts of money at ridiculously low interest rates and continuing to use our increasingly shaky currency which we are debasing at a staggering pace.

We consume far more than we produce, and unlike Venezuela we aren’t sitting on hundreds of billions of barrels of oil. The amount of “real wealth” that we actually have does not justify our current standard of living. The only way that we are able to live the way that we do is by stealing consumption from the future.

One study has found that our debt level is the highest that it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and yet we continue to race down this road to economic oblivion without even thinking twice about it. What you sow is what you will reap. And just like Venezuela, America will ultimately reap a very bitter harvest.

The new rules have gone all-in to push the “gender identity” ideology and transgender agenda by demanding that everyone in the school system must use the scientifically incorrect pronouns and made-up names preferred by a tiny minority of people who say they prefer to be treated as members of the opposite sex.

Even scarier for parents, the new guidelines tell CPS employees that they must conceal from parents evidence that their child is claiming to be transgender and is experimenting with gender-switching while in school, if the child wants the parents excluded.

The guidelines state that when talking to parents or legal guardians “school staff should not disclose a student’s preferred name, pronoun, or other confidential information pertaining to the student’s transgender or gender nonconforming status without the student’s permission, unless authorized to do so by the Law Department.”

From our top leaders on down, people are engaged in incredibly self-destructive behavior and are making extremely irrational decisions. Some would describe it as being given over to a depraved mind, and I would have to agree. It is almost as if some sort of severe form of mental illness were rapidly spreading through the air and infecting everyone. Virtually every day I am immersed in news and current events, and it can be difficult to shock me after all this time. But lately, there have been quite a few stories that have stunned even me.

One of the big reasons why there is so much craziness in America today is because there is no longer a shared set of values or morals that unites us. You would like to think that we should all be able to at least agree on the US Constitution, but in law school I learned that courts routinely ignore the Constitution whenever it suits them. In fact, we might as well not even have a Constitution anymore because hardly anyone in the legal community takes it seriously these days.

Without any foundation to stand on, it is inevitable that our nation will crumble. The widespread insanity that we are witnessing is simply the acceleration of a process of decay that has been in motion for decades. I would like to think that we could turn things around, but at this point I am not very optimistic.

The system, dubbed the Pilot, comprises two earpieces to be worn by two people who do not speak the same language and uses an app so the duo can converse with ease. It is claimed to be the first 'smart earpiece' capable of translating between two languages. The company behind the technology, Waverly Labs, said: 'This little wearable uses translation technology to allow two people to speak different languages but still clearly understand each other.'

While the first generation device works only when speaking to someone wearing an earpiece, future generations could listen to everything happening nearby, so pairs of devices won't be needed. It could be likened to the Universal Translator device in Star Trek.