Disaster

A powerful earthquake, with a preliminary magnitude of M7.3 on the Richter scale, since reduced to M6.9  by the USGS, struck Japan 156 miles northeast of Tokyo at 5:59am local time.

The epicenter of the earthquake, which was felt in Tokyo, was off the coast of Fukushima prefecture at a depth of about 10 km, Japan's Meteorological Agency said, the same Fukushima that was site of the 2011 natural disaster and tsunami that resulted in the worst nuclear power plant disaster since Chernobyl.

Preliminary results of a two-year University of Alaska Fairbanks 9/11 study looking into the destruction of World Trade Center 7 indicates that “office fires” could not possibly have caused the collapse. In May 2015, a team of researchers began the two-year engineering investigation of the collapse of WTC7. Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and two Ph.D. research assistants partnered with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. “We will investigate the collapse.

Scientists in Russia have announced the discovery of water from Noah’s Ark which they have dated back to the great flood. Scientists say the discovery proves that the Biblical account of Noah’s flood is real, and that the flood waters drained into a subterranean sinkhole known as the Kola Borehole. Express.co.uk reports: The Kola Borehole could only go down as deep as 12km before being blocked by a mystery force. A video exposing the so-called Kola conspiracy says the established view of the earth’s makeup – crust, mantle and core – was proved wrong by the geological dig.

The European Space Agency may team up with NASA to launch a 2020 mission against a dangerous asteroid headed for earth. Planetary scientists and experts have released an open letter urging support for the mission. The space agencies plan to crash a probe into a 160m wide asteroid and deflect it from its course. Actors Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis similarly tried stopping an asteroid that was threatening to collide with earth, in the 1998 disaster movie Armageddon. Daily Star reports: It comes after the Chelyabinsk meteor, which was just 20m wide, exploded over Russia in 2013.

Colum Lynch has more details on how the Saudis pressured the U.N. into removing its Yemen war coalition from the blacklist of violators of children’s rights:

Saudi Arabia threatened this week to break relations with the United Nations and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to its humanitarian relief and counterterrorism programs to strong-arm the U.N. into removing Riyadh and its allies from a blacklist of groups that are accused of harming children in armed conflict.