AWC new’s

A United States F-18 fighter jet has crashed into a residential neighbourhood in California, destroying a house, but there are no immediate reports of injuries, aviation and military officials said.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said in a statement the pilot of the jet ejected as the plane made its approach to land at the Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, near San Diego, shortly before midday on Monday (local time).

A Marine Corps spokesman meanwhile, has confirmed the plane was carrying two crew but their fate was not immediately known.

The cause of the crash is also unknown, Captain Carl Redding said.

There are no immediate reports of the pilot’s condition or possible injuries on the ground, but local television showed plumes of thick white smoke rising from the crash site in the suburb of University City.

The charred remains of a building were also clearly visible.

The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department said the crash destroyed one home and extensively damaged another before a blaze at the scene was extinguished.

One eyewitness told a local television reporter that the plane had spiraled out of control like a scene from 1986 movie Top Gun, the hit film about a US Navy fighter pilot played by Tom Cruise.

“It just spiraled right out of Top Gun. It came flying down. My mother screamed,” the man said, reporting that he had seen the plane’s pilot after he parachuted to earth at a nearby school playing field.

“He just looked like he was dazed like ‘Oh, my God, what happened over civilian air space?’,” he said.

Witnesses told local radio the pilot might have been heading the plane to crash in a big canyon nearby, thereby avoiding the school.

Gayle Newcomb, an assistant at University City High School near the crash site, said the plane “missed the school entirely” and all the students are safe.

UFO enthusiasts are pressing Barack Obama to release classified documents about sightings of alien spacecraft, encouraged by support from within the President-Elect’s own White House team.

Desperate to see the US emulate the British Government and disclose reported “contact” with UFOs, the enthusiasts have written to Mr Obama to ask that his administration comes clean about the contents of America’s “X-Files”.

They believe they have good prospects of success after public statements of support from both John Podesta, who is running Mr Obama’s White House transition team, and Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico – a UFO sighting hotspot – who is expected to secure a cabinet post.

In the letter to Mr Obama, the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee calls on the President-Elect to “end the six-decade truth embargo regarding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race“.

The group wants the incoming president to insist on a “full briefing from your military services and intelligence agencies regarding what they know” and to open congressional hearings “to take testimony from scores of government witnesses who have already come forward with extraordinary evidence and are prepared to testify under oath.”

The campaigners, who resent their common portrayal as nuts and conspiracy theorists, have high hopes of success due to their inside track with Mr Obama.

When he was the White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, Mr Podesta led a project to declassify 800 million pages of intelligence documents. In a press conference, still available to watch on the YouTube website, Mr Podesta said: “It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the real nature of this phenomenon.“

Gov Richardson, a former presidential candidate and fellow UFO aficionado, has written a forward to a book on the so-called Roswell Incident in New Mexico, where campaigners believe an alien spacecraft crash landed near the town of Roswell in 1947 and that the corpses of humanoid aliens have been kept hidden under lock and key by the government.

He has called for full disclosure by the Pentagon of what really occurred and reiterated his belief that there had been a “cover-up” during a presidential debate last year.

The campaigners, who want the truth “out there”, believe that the British Government’s decision to declassify thousands of UFO sighting documents this year has made it untenable for the US to maintain its policy of non-disclosure.

Only last week a US Air Force pilot, Milton Torres, whose testimony was released from the British archives, appeared on US television explaining how he was ordered to shoot down a large UFO over the UK in 1957 and then silenced by military officials, who told him never to speak of the incident.

Stephen Bassett, Executive Director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee, expects to have gathered 40,000 signatures via email and fax by Mr Obama’s inauguration day on Jan 20 in support of his calls for openness.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “The truth embargo is now at the end of the line. The release of documents in Britain and France has put huge pressure on the US. It makes the government here look pretty stupid.

“I think we are seeing the Democrats moving towards disclosure. John Podesta has outed himself as an enthusiast. He thinks the American public can handle the truth. Bill Richardson thinks there was a cover-up.“

Mr Bassett also believes that military and intelligence officials have studied the technology of alien spacecraft, material that would help the US develop new energy resources, as Mr Obama wishes, that will lessen US dependency on Middle Eastern oil.

Come December 31, all albuterol inhalers in the U.S. will be a little bit greener— and a lot more expensive. The inhalers will stop using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that damage the ozone layer, and will be powered by hydroflueroalkane (HFC) instead. While the new inhalers will benefit the environment, they will also cost $30 to $60. CFC inhalers cost only $5 to $10.

The HFC inhalers will be strange to albuterol veterans— the medicine tastes and feels different, and the inhaler’s hole needs to be cleaned weekly to prevent clogging.

For asthma sufferers that are averse to change, non-prescription epinephrine inhalers will contain CFCs until the government cracks down in December 2011. But replacing albuterol with epinephrine is dangerous, as the non-prescription drug(like cheap allegra & canadian singulair) is less effective.

The change may not be palatable to everyone, but asthmatics should take comfort in the fact that their medicine is no longer destroying the ozone layer.

Photograph snapped by a Newfoundland rig manager shows an enormous Iceberg 

This is an amazing shot. This came from a Rig Manager for Global Marine Drilling in St. Johns, Newfoundland. They actually have to divert the path of these things away from the rig by towing them with ships! Anyway, in this particular case the water was calm & the sun was almost directly overhead so that the diver was able to get into the water and click this picture. They estimated the weight at 300,000,000 tons.

The explanation reproduced above is a charming story, but it isn’t true, nor is the image accompanying it a real photograph of an iceberg. This picture is actually a composite image called “The Essence of Imagination,” marketed by Successories, the “premiere source for motivational media.” This image was produced in 1999 by Ralph A. Clevenger, a professional nature and underwater photographer who is also a member of the faculty of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California.

As Mr. Clevenger explained, this image is not a single photograph but a composite of four different photographs (not all taken in the same place): The iceberg image is a digital composite that I designed to illustrate the concept of “what you see is not necessarily what you get”. As an underwater photographer I knew that my “vision” of what a big iceberg looks like was impossible to get in reality so I had to create it. The image exists in nature but due to water visibility is not possible to capture on film.

There are 4 separate images involved; the sky, the background, the top iceberg (shot in Antarctica), and the underwater iceberg (shot above water in Alaska and flipped in the final composite).

With injectable human growth hormone, there is much skepticism about absorption, best time to inject and the amount to inject.

With the cost of injectable HGH at about $800.00 to $1200.00 per month and HGH Energizer pills or spray at $59.00 per month it takes the guess work out of the equation. Injectable HGH is active approximately 30 minutes in your system before it is dissipated or lost. Because HGH dosages are not an exact science, clinical trials have not yet determined the quantity (IU’s) needed, injection times, durations for optimum results. Which simply put means there is a lot of wasted HGH happening besides the side effects that come with incorrect dosages.

Cheap Human Growth Hormone

There is also the chance that while injecting HGH that your pituitary gland could be permanently shut down. This is why supplementing HGH Energizer in a way that mimics the body’s own cycle of secretion is far more efficient because you take small dosages giving you 100% absorption.

I am having flashbacks to summer right now! The kids are off school today and tomorrow thanks to Teacher Workdays/Election Day. While I am happy that I did not have to get everyone up at the crack of dawn and rush around until 8:15 getting all three kids to school, I am also wondering how much work I am actually going to accomplish this week.

Once I make it through Monday and Tuesday, my time will still be limited as I have meetings of some sort every day this week. I am going to have to be ultra productive during the time I am in the office, which means setting priorities.

The most important things I need to do this week are:
Finish a web site for a client – it’s so close to being done – and schedule a meeting with her to review.
Layout the program for our gym’s first competition of the season and get it to the printers by Wednesday.
Redesign this site – while I love the Pink for October header that I created, it is time for something new.

On a personal front, I need to:
Make a large crock-pot of chili and some rice for a get together Friday night.
Drink more water. No Diet Coke or sodas for me this week as I am trying to eliminate them completely.
Ride the stationary bike 3 times this week.

With careful planning and setting goals, you would be amazed at how much you can really get done when you think you are pressed for time! What are your goals this week? Leave them in the comments or post on your own site and let’s get it done!

I read about the sporty new Corolla, the increased power, and the additional luxury features and thought it was going to take a hit in mpg and emissions. How did I know? The 2008 Toyota Corolla base model gets 28 mpg in the city and 37 mpg on bigger roads. The 2009 Corolla will see that decrease to 27/35 mpg. That’s not too bad, but it’s not a move forward. t’s beefed-up model poses the real problem. In the XRS, fitted with a 2.4-liter, 158 hp engine, fuel consumption slumps to 22/30 mpg. Boo Hiss Boo.

Now, you know the Matrix is billed as a subcompact sedan/SUV. It’s also available in an XRS model with even worse mileage – 21/29. The smaller engine delivers 26/32 manual and 25/31 for the automatic version. Both cars are considerably more sporty, with more available features. I just hope new buyers will ask themselves whether they really need the extra power.