The summer movie season is back, and what do we see the most of? Sequels! Some of us are getting a little tired of seeing so many themes repeated again and again and wonder why movie studios can’t give us something NEW.
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But why? – Information from military satellites about incoming asteroids has always been given to scientists in the past, but now the military has suddenly classified the information.

A recent US military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by spy satellites of incoming fireballs have been classified as secret so they cannot be released. These are satellites that detect nuclear bomb sites and tests, such as those in North Korea and Iran. As a side effect, they have also detected potentially incoming asteroids. This means that incoming space rocks that may explode in our atmosphere are now classified, so we cannot be prepared for a possible cataclysm.
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Taking tourists out to go whale watching produces much more revenue for coastal communities than hunting whales for food. So why do some countries still hunt these intelligent mammals down?

A report from a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) shows that the whale watching industry is now worth over two billion dollars a year worldwide. Despite this, Iceland (which wants to expand its tourist industry) recently announced a major expansion of its whale hunts, with the aim of killing 250 whales this year.

In BBC News, Richard Black quotes the IWC’s Patrick Ramage as saying, “Whales are worth far more alive than dead.”
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China is exporting a new kind of dangerous item: Spam. It’s not enough that they’re polluting our air, they’re also polluting our computers.

So far in 2009, nearly three-quarters of the websites advertised in computer spam have been traced to China. Researcher Gary Warner says, “China has become a safe haven for website operators that use spam to promote their products because of the willingness of some Chinese web-hosting companies to ignore spam complaints about those sites, which are hosted on their servers for a fee. The hosting companies don’t create the spam, but rather declare themselves bullet-proof hosting sites, meaning that regardless of the illegal activities being reported, they will not terminate their customer
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