‘Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. And there shall be signs in the sun and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.’" (Luke 21 v.10-11, 25-26)
Brazilian Toddler Wakes Up at His Funeral
After he's pronounced dead, a two-year-old briefly comes back to life.
Published: June 15th, 2012
Back in the old days, when someone died, you'd have a "wake" for them. While we still do this today, the reasoning isn't the same. These days, we do it to remember our lost loved one, to look at old pictures together and commiserate. Back then, though, wakes were held to make sure the person was really dead, which is the subject of this story. Earlier this month in Brazil, a two-year-old boy woke up at his own funeral, asked for some water, then laid back down, only this time, he was actually dead.
The child's family was naturally devastated.
The boy's father, Antonio Santos, said, "Everybody started to scream, we couldn't believe our eyes. Then we thought a miracle had taken place and our boy had come back to life. Then Kelvin just laid back down, the way he was. We couldn't wake him. He was dead again."
The family rushed the boy back to the hospital, where doctors re examined him but pronounced him dead again, unfortunately.
"They assured me that he really was dead and gave me no explanation for what we had just seen and heard," Santos said.
Kelvin Santos had supposedly died earlier that week, and the doctors said at the time that he had stopped breathing during pneumonia treatment. Santos said that his son was a victim of medical malpractice, and has registered a complaint with the police.
The family delayed the funeral for a while just to make sure, but ended up burying the boy later that day.
What do we see in the Gaza Strip
Hell on Earth
Mile High mystery: UFO sightings in sky over Denver
+ toward downtown Denver.
He said, “The flying objects appear around noon or 1:00 p.m. at least a couple of times a week.” The strangest part is they are flying too fast to see with the naked eye, but when we slowed down the video, several UFOs appear.
We altered the color contrast to make it easier to see. You can take a look for yourself by watching the video clip.
We wanted to verify the video we saw was legitimate and not doctored in anyway. So our photojournalist set up his camera in the same spot, and shot video from just before noon until just after 1:00 p.m. He also captured something unexplained on video.
Aviation expert Steve Cowell is a former commercial pilot, instructor and FAA accident prevention counselor.
He thought he would have a logical explanation, until he watched the video. “That is not an airplane, that is not a helicopter, those are not birds, I can’t identify it,” he said. He also told us the objects are not insects.
He said he knows of no aircraft that flies as fast. He did tell us there is one other possibility. “Perhaps there’s some sort of debris that is being raised up by some of the atmospheric winds.”
But in his professional opinion, “As it fits the definition, it’s an unidentified flying object.”
The FAA tracks all air traffic in Colorado and across the country. The FAA sent us a statement that says, “We`ve checked with air traffic control and no one has had any reports of the activity you described…nor have any of our employees observed anything of this nature either visually or on their radar displays.”
Tarantulas’ invade Assam town, ‘kill’ two
Jintu Gogoi's neighbourhood in Sadiya, Upper Assam, is no longer friendly. Over two weeks ago, an army of eight-legged freaks invaded it. It all happened in the evening on May 8. Most of the inhabitants of Chaulkhowa Nagaon village had been to a Bihu function. When the programme drew to a close, swarms of spiders suddenly descended from nowhere and started biting the people. The festive mood soon turned into one of panic with people bumping into each other and tripping over empty benches in their frantic bid to egress. Jintu was bitten by one of these critters.
Dozens of dead blackbirds have fallen from the sky over a small Arkansas town for the second year in a row.
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That the town of Beebe has seen this before, however, doesn't make the deaths of dozens of birds any less odd -- maybe even more so.
ABC Arkansas affiliate KATV reported that a radar image showed a large mass over Beebe a few hours before midnight Saturday. Then the birds began falling from the sky, just like last year.
Emily Nichols, a police dispatcher in Beebe, told ABC Radio that she received multiple calls. "Just that blackbirds are falling again and that they found black birds on their streets where they live or at churches," Nichols said.
Animal Care and Control was called out at about 7 p.m., a few hours earlier than last year, Horace Taylor of Animal Care and Control in Beebe told ABC Radio.
ABC
Thousands of dead blackbirds rained down.
"Well, there was just birds falling down on the street and people dodging and missing them," Taylor said. "And we were down the street picking them up. We got called out by the chief and we all out trying to pick them off the street."
Taylor added that the Game and Fish Department took about 30 of the nearly 100 birds for testing to try to determine what happened.
Fireworks were blamed for the deaths of thousands of blackbirds last year, but it's unclear whether fireworks were the cause this time. Police imposed an impromptu ban on fireworks when the birds began falling this year.
Lt. Brian Duke of the Beebe Police Department told ABC this year wasn't nearly as bad as last year, when the birds covered the streets of Beebe. This year, they were concentrated in a smaller area and the birds were cleaned up quickly. There haven't been any reports of people being hit by a falling bird.
Biologists said last year's kill was caused by birds who were spooked off their roosts by the loud explosions and began flying into homes, cars, telephone poles and each other.
Around this same time last year, thousands of dead fish also turned up in the Arkansas River, prompting conspiracies about the end of the world, poison and environmental catastrophe.
UN warns of looming worldwide food crisis in 2013
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World grain reserves are so dangerously low that severe weather in the United States or other food-exporting countries could trigger a major hunger crisis next year, the United Nations has warned.
Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heat waves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN.
"We've not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year," said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). With food consumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves from an average of 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to under 74 days recently.
Prices of main food crops such as wheat and maize are now close to those that sparked riots in 25 countries in 2008. FAO figures released this week suggest that 870 million people are malnourished and the food crisis is growing in the Middle East and Africa. Wheat production this year is expected to be 5.2% below 2011, with yields of most other crops, except rice, also falling, says the UN.
The figures come as one of the world's leading environmentalists issued a warning that the global food supply system could collapse at any point, leaving hundreds of millions more people hungry, sparking widespread riots and bringing down governments. In a shocking new assessment of the prospects of meeting food needs, Lester Brown, president of the Earth policy research centre in Washington, says that the climate is no longer reliable and the demands for food are growing so fast that a breakdown is inevitable, unless urgent action is taken.
"Food shortages undermined earlier civilisations. We are on the same path. Each country is now fending for itself. The world is living one year to the next," he writes in a new book.
According to Brown, we are seeing the start of a food supply breakdown with a dash by speculators to "grab" millions of square miles of cheap farmland, the doubling of international food prices in a decade, and the dramatic run down of countries' food reserves.
This year, for the sixth time in 11 years, the world will consume more food than it produces, largely because of extreme weather in the US and other major food-exporting countries. Oxfam last week said that the price of key staples, including wheat and rice, may double in the next 20 years, threatening disastrous consequences for poor people who spend a large proportion of their income on food.
In 2012, according to the FAO, food prices are already at close to record levels, having risen 1.4% in September following an increase of 6% in July.
"We are entering a new era of rising food prices and spreading hunger. Food supplies are tightening everywhere and land is becoming the most sought-after commodity as the world shifts from an age of food abundance to one of scarcity," says Brown. "The geopolitics of food is fast overshadowing the geopolitics of oil."
His warnings come as the UN and world governments reported that extreme heat and drought in the US and other major food-exporting countries had hit harvests badly and sent prices spiralling.
"The situation we are in is not temporary. These things will happen all the time. Climate is in a state of flux and there is no normal any more.
"We are beginning a new chapter. We will see food unrest in many more places.
"Armed aggression is no longer the principal threat to our future. The overriding threats to this century are climate change, population growth, spreading water shortages and rising food prices," Brown says.
According the Book of Revelation in the Bible, one of the signs that Armageddon is at hand will be an angel pouring a bowl into the rivers, causing them to turn to blood. The verse, Revelation 16:4, reads: “Then the third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of waters; and they became blood.”
The Yangtze River
The Yangtze River, China’s largest river, is known as the Golden Watercourse, but residents along its shores noticed this week that the water wasn’t its usual hue, rather the water had turned red, and no one seems to know why.
ABC News reported that the river turned red on Thursday near the city of Chongquing, where the Yangtze meets the Jialin River. Some residents were stumped by the turn of events, stopping to collect the water in bottles as a keepsake. A photo showing a man with water from the river in a clear plastic bottle made the water look almost as brightly colored as tomato juice. Others, like fisherman and thous working on boats went about their usual daily business.
Scotsman.com reported that the river was reported as having turned red by people at various spots along its course, and added that local officials are investigating, but do not know why the Yangtze river turned red.
The UK Daily Mail reported that this isn’t the first time a Chinese river turned red. The Jian River experienced a similar event last December when it was polluted by a powerful dye that was being illegally dumped. Officials raided and shut down the factory responsible.
While there a number of less than supernatural causes for why the Yangtze River is now red, the Daily Mail did note a creepy correlation from Christian scripture.
