President Elect Obama Warned to "Brace Himself" For An Attack

President Elect Obama has been warned by leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to "brace himself for an early assault by terrorists."

General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, this week acknowledged that there were dangers during a presidential transition when new officials were coming in and getting accustomed to the challenges. But he added that no “real or artificial spike” in intercepted transmissions from terror suspects had been detected.

Britain and the US are sharing all intelligence on suspected terrorist activity because of the high risk of a plot involving transatlantic flights. Al-Qaeda is understood still to be obsessed with mounting an attack using passenger airliners. There have also been warnings of al-Qaeda interest in developing a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) device. The US has anti-CBRN units on constant patrol in main cities.

Al-Qaeda is known to be experimenting with biological agents, particularly anthrax, which they acquire from dead animals and then create cultures. The key man involved in these experiments is Abou Kabbah al-Masri, who was engaged in the biological trials including tests on rabbits that were uncovered in Afghanistan when the Taleban were overrun after the US invasion in 2001.

Source

Important Books You MUST ADD To Your Reading List, To Understand Where America May Be Headed Next.

If you're looking for some fine reading, and what the future of the Country may look like I have two great books I am recommending for you. The first one is the new book by Bill Gertz, The Failure Factory: How Unelected Bureaucrats, Liberal Democrats, and Big Government Republicans are Undermining America's Security and Leading Us to War.

The other is a book by Robert J. Shapiro is called Futurecast and is a very telling book, especially if you consider what it says about European Countries like France and the economic crisis they have been facing and the path we are about to head down in this Country. If you are interested in learning about what will happen in the future as we make current policy changes today this book is a MUST READ.

Golden Guardian 2008 Starting 10:00 AM PST

Today at 10:00 AM PST the largest earthquake drill and exercise in history is taking place.

Golden Guardian 2008, The Great Southern California Shakeout is now taking place. It is based on a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

San Francisco Mayor Newsom Announces Influenza Task Force

Mayor Gavin Newsom along with San Francisco City health officials, have announced the creation of an Influenza Task Force at a press conference. The meeting took place on November 16 2005.

UPDATE: Another photo from the meeting

Google Announces Flu Tracking Capabilities, May Predict Outbreak Before CDC

Google announced yesterday that they are tracking flu trends and hope to be able to alert people to an outbreak before the CDC is even aware an outbreak has occurred.

According to a post on the Google.org Blog "The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.

For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics.

We shared our preliminary results with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC throughout the 2007-2008 flu season, and together we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data. Our system is still very experimental, so anything is possible, but we're hoping to see similar correlations in the coming year."

Source 1
Source 2 Google Flu Trends