BALTIC SEA – A significant focus of BALTOPS every year is the demonstration of NATO mine hunting capabilities, and this year the U.S. Navy continues to use the exercise as an opportunity to test emerging technology.
In support of BALTOPS, U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers to bring the latest advancements in Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) mine hunting technology to the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.

Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark

European security officials on Monday and Tuesday observed Russian Navy support ships in the vicinity of leaks in the Nord Stream pipelines likely caused by underwater explosions, according two Western intelligence officials and one other source familiar with the matter.

It’s unclear whether the ships had anything to do with those explosions, these sources and others said – but it’s one of the many factors that investigators will be looking into.

Western troops, policemen, and civilians are largely to blame for the rapid growth of the sex slavery industry in Kosovo over the past five years, a mushrooming trade in which hundreds of women, many of them under-age girls, are tortured, raped, abused and then criminalised, Amnesty International said yesterday.

In a report on the Mb, Amnesty said Nato soldiers, UN police, and western aid workers operated with near impunity in exploiting the victims of the sex traffickers.

As a result of the influx of thousands of Nato-led peacekeepers, "Kosovo soon became a major destination country for women trafficked into forced prostitution. A small-scale local market for prostitution was transformed into a large-scale industry based on trafficking, predominantly run by criminal networks."

The international presence in Kosovo continues to generate 80% of the income for the pimps, brothel-owners, and mafiosi who abduct local girls or traffic women mainly from Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia to Kosovo via Serbia, the report said, although the international "client base" for the sex trade has fallen to 20% last year from 80% four years ago.

Up to 2,000 women are estimated to have been coerced into sex slavery in Kosovo, which had seen "an unprecedented escalation in trafficking" in recent years. The number of premises in Kosovo listed by a special UN police unit as being involved in the rackets has swollen from 18 in 1999 to 200 this year.

A few weeks ago the UN's department of peacekeeping in New York acknowledged that "peacekeepers have come to be seen as part of the problem in trafficking rather than the solution".

The sex slavery in Kosovo parallels similar phenomena next door in Bosnia, where the arrival of thousands of Nato peacekeepers in 1995 fuelled a thriving forced prostitution industry.

International personnel in Kosovo enjoy immunity from prosecution unless this is waived by the UN in New York for UN employees or by national military chiefs for Nato-led troops.

One police officer last year and another the year before had their immunity waived, enabling criminal prosecutions.

"Amnesty International has been unable to find any evidence of any criminal proceedings related to trafficking against any military personnel in their home countries," the 80-page report said.

The report said that US, French, German and Italian soldiers were known to have been involved in the rackets.

Criticism of the international troops in Kosovo follows a recent broader indictment of the Kosovo mission by the International Crisis Group thinktank, which called for the mission to be overhauled.

Women were bought and sold for up to £2,000 and then kept in appalling conditions as slaves by their "owners", Amnesty said. They were routinely raped "as a means of control and coercion", beaten, held at gunpoint, robbed, and kept in darkened rooms unable to go out.

Apart from women trafficked into Kosovo, there is a worsening problem with girls abducted locally. A Kosovo support group working with victims reported that a third of these locals were under 14, and 80% were under 18.

The UN admission in March that its peacekeepers were part of the problem was welcome, said Amnesty.

September 23, 2017
BUNIA, Congo (AP) — She had been orphaned by a brutal conflict, but the 14-year-old Congolese girl found refuge in a camp protected by United Nations peacekeepers.

The camp should have been safe the day she was raped. A delegation from the U.N. was paying a visit, and her grandmother had left her in charge of her siblings. That was the day, the girl says, that a Pakistani peacekeeper slipped inside their home and assaulted her in front of the other children.

But that was not the end of her story. Even though she reported the rape, the girl never got any help from the U.N. She did become pregnant, however, and had a baby.

...

The raped teenager’s experience is grimly emblematic of the underbelly of U.N. peacekeeping, and the organization as a whole. During a yearlong investigation, the AP found that despite promising reform for more than a decade, the U.N. failed to meet many of its pledges to stop the abuse or help victims, some of whom have been lost to a sprawling bureaucracy. Cases have disappeared or been handed off to the peacekeepers’ home countries — which often do nothing with them.

The attack on the 14-year-old was so brazen it still haunts the U.N.’s top human rights official more than a decade after hearing the girl’s story.

“What on earth would it take for this soldier not to do it — to have all the heads of the U.N. together, and he still does it?” asked Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, a member of the delegation that heard the girl’s testimony in 2004. One year later, he helped write a landmark report intended to curb sexual abuse and exploitation within the U.N. system.

With rare exceptions, victims interviewed by the AP received no help. Instead, many were banished from their families for having mixed-race children, who also are shunned, becoming a second generation of victims.

The AP even found a girl who was raped by two peacekeepers; she gave birth to two babies by the time she was 14.

To this day, the sexual violence by U.N. peacekeepers and personnel continues: Congo already accounts for nearly one-third of the 43 allegations made worldwide in 2017.

William L. Swing was in charge of the Congo mission between May 2003 and January 2008, a period when abuse allegations swelled in a country that has been torn by dictatorship, civil war and unrest for the last half-century.

“I take full responsibility for what happened,” Swing told the AP. “I knew at the time the buck stopped with me.”

Swing said the U.N. at times made it clear he should be relieved of his duties. Instead, he was named the head of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration. Now, he sits on a new task force appointed to tackle the problem yet again. Swing insists the mistakes made during the early years of the Congo mission provided lessons that could shape new reforms.

...

Women were bought and sold for up to £2,000 and then kept in appalling conditions as slaves by their "owners", Amnesty said. They were routinely raped "as a means of control and coercion", beaten, held at gunpoint, robbed, and kept in darkened rooms unable to go out.

....jako důsledku exponenciálního nárůstu hodin provolaných mobilními telefony jsou totiž v příkrém rozporu se skutečně pozorovanými výskyty těchto onemocnění. Ten je dlouhodobě konstantní.

Conclusions
Acoustic BB reduced pain intensity, stress and analgesic use, compared to SS, in chronic pain patients.

Significance
This study provides evidence that theta rhythm binaural beats can alleviate pain intensity, both after a brief 30 minute and a longer one week on-demand intervention. The subsequent significant reduction in analgesic medication consumption in chronic pain patients' daily living could offer a valuable tool, augmenting the effect of existing pain therapies.

... In particular, detailed information regarding the mechanism of biological effect by RF-EMFs has not yet been elucidated clearly. Recent studies show that RF-EMFs emitted by cellular phones are absorbed into the brain, to a degree, that can affect neuronal activity (Kleinlogel et al., 2008; Jeong et al., 2015; Jiang et al., 2016). In addition, the thermal effects of RF-EMFs suggest the possibility of affecting neuronal activity by temperature generated by mobile phones (Wainwright, 2000; Wyde et al., 2018). Therefore, there is a need for scientifically proven information on the effects of increasing exposure to RF-EMFs on nerve cells, including neurodevelopment, function and cognitive functions (Calvente et al., 2016; Birks et al., 2017). However, many studies on the possible influence of electromagnetic waves on neurons have recently been conducted with great interest, but there are conflicting results according to experimental conditions and there is still much to be studied to gain a basic understanding.

....Despite these controversies, the World Health Organization has classified RF-EMFs as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ (Baan et al., 2011). However, the classification of RF-EMFs as possible carcinogens has yet to come to a clear conclusion among scientists. This is due to the fact that only 30 years have passed since the mobile phone has been used in earnest, it needs decades of exposure, and further epidemiological analysis to come to any conclusions.

...

The autophagosome and autolysosome, which are major autophagic structures, were increased 3–4 times higher than in the control group (Kim et al., 2018b). These results suggest that the activation of autophagy could be one of the main adaptation mechanism of neurons to electromagnetic stress.

...


The IARC has classified RF-EMFs as a possibly carcinogenic to humans (Baan et al., 2011) and warms of the danger of EMF exposure. Moreover, it has been hypothesized that a variety of neurological effects may occur as a result of RF-EMF exposure due to the proximity of the cranial nervous system and the location where the cellular phone is predominantly used. These neurological abnormalities include headache (Frey, 1998), changes in sleep habits (Wagner et al., 1998), and changes in EEG (Braune et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998). In addition, significant statistical results have been reported by various epidemiological studies on neurological cognitive disorders such as headache, tremor, dizziness, memory loss, loss of concentration, and sleep disturbance due to RF-EMF (Kolodynski and Kolodynska, 1996; Santini et al., 2002; Hutter et al., 2006; Abdel-Rassoul et al., 2007). As a possible mechanism for the change of neurological functions by RF-EMFs exposure, we are confident that more mechanisms will be involved than those mentioned, but we have summarized only recent studies on thermal effects, activation of autophagy processes, changes in ion-channel expression, and changes in myelin sheaths in this review (Fig. 3). Most of these studies were performed using cell or animal models and they have provided basic information on the underlying possible biological effects of RF-EMFs exposure to living creatures. So, these results could not apply to humans directly. Precise epidemiological studies are needed to confirm the possible biological effects of RF-EMF exposure to humans. Recently, the governmental regulation on RF-EMFs of individual devices has been introduced to reflect the concern about the biological effect of RF-EMFs. However, the possible biological effects on electromagnetic fields exposure has not yet been well established even in scientific communities. Therefore, it is necessary to apply international standard at the preventive level at least and disclose related information to public in a transparent manner.

During operation, GSM mobile phones are the sources of magnetic fields at the ELF range. Perentos et al. [33], have measured a magnetic flux density value of less than 100μT at 217Hz, which is the main spectral component associated with the GSM pulses, and confirmed the presence of spectral components at 2.1 and 8.3 Hz.

...


CONCLUSIONS  Some new research results show no association between brain tumor and mobile phone radiation. Others, however, suggest that mobile radiation double the risk of developing cancer on the side of the head used, increase brain activity, can cause damage to nerves around ears and, more importantly, damages the BBB. Al though research studies on the impact of Mobil e phones radiation on health remains inconclusive, previous research results has taken the prevention of heating effects as a basis for exposure guidelines. But new research recent results demonstrate that mobile phones can affect cells without heating them.  The ICNIRP guidelines was set based on the behavioral changes when experimental animal s are exposed to RF radiation at level s which produce temperature rise of more than 1C o Therefore, new research results raise the question about the effectiveness of the ICNIRP exposure guidelines to prevent health implication to human. In fact some countries are starting to impose new exposure measures. For example, China is planning a new strict standards that would cap handset radiation emissions at half the level s all owed elsewhere.  The amount of radiation that can be passed from a handset to a user, the SAR, will be limited to 1 Watt/ Kgm instead of 2Watt/ Kgm Even with those studies that show no relation between brain tumors and mobile phones radiation, such investigations do not measure risks for cancers such as brain tumors with longer latency periods of induction or for slow growing tumors. Mobile phones have not been in use for long enough to allow comprehensive epidemiological assessment of their impact on health.  Literature review indicated that the strength and exposure duration of ELF EMF has been found to be playing key role in initiating effects related to brain ,anxiety, sleep disorder, behavioral studies and electrophysiological signals.  Wider scope of research is identified to establish exact link between ELF and EMF (especially electric field) and electrophysiological signal behavior. Refined research can be still carried out in determining exact threshold value, different range of frequencies and exposure scenarios too