Thursday, 3 October 2013

The European Union Times

Nearly 5 million people unemployed in Spain

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 02:25 PM PDT

Official figures show that the unemployment rate in Spain has increased again with nearly five million people out of work in the recession-hit country.
Figures released by Spain’s Labor Ministry on Wednesday indicated that the number of people registered as out of work rose by 25,572 people in September.
The ministry added that the total number of unemployed people in Spain remained at around 4.7 million.
The rise brought an end to a six-month streak of gradual declines in the unemployment rate of the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy.
The official jobless rate in Spain hit over 26 percent in the second quarter of 2013.
Last week, the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy predicted that the unemployment rate would be 26.6 percent in the current year and 25.9 percent in 2014.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that Madrid faces five more years with a jobless rate of over 25 percent, unless it implements new reforms including measures to assist firms in slashing wages instead of cutting staff.
On September 13, the IMF added Spain to a list of countries with relatively large economic imbalances, saying that public debt continues to rise in the European country.
The Spanish economy slumped by more than 1.35 percent in 2012, which was the second worst yearly fall since 1970.
Battered by the global financial downturn, the Spanish economy collapsed into recession in the second half of 2008, taking millions of jobs with it.
The Spanish government has been sharply criticized over its austerity measures that are hitting the middle and working classes the hardest.
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Greek opposition MEPs released due to lack of evidence

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 02:21 PM PDT

Prosecutors and investigators came to an agreement, Kasidiaris was released on bail, while Panagiotaros and Michos were released without bail, but all 3 are banned from exiting the country for the time being. John Lagos is still being held likely for political reasons.
It appears that the foreign ordered witchunt against Golden Dawn is collapsing due to its science fiction type accusations. The media will be held accountable soon enough for it’s days and days of bombardment with lies and deceit.
The people’s nationalist movement presses on, Greece will win!
Greek media implies “Evidence of Crime” found in homes of Kasidiaris and Lagos, yet none are found
Our comrades and democratically elected parliament members, John Lagos and Ilias Kasidiaris had their homes ransacked, before the evidence of what the police found was released, the media was claiming all kinds of “Illegal Evidence” was being taken. What they found instead was USB drives, memory cards, and then legal weapons with the permits to go with them.
The media did not retract the earlier implications of course, but below you can see the photos below of what they did to their homes:

Also, the media began talking about a “Golden Dawn Secret Armory” in Agrinio, what police found instead was an empty box for handcuffs, 3 rifle cartridge cases issued from the Greek Army (Every Greek male is required to serve in the Army by law, and these are found all over Greece) and… the big centerpiece of this secret armory: 5,155 grams of tobacco! Too bad Sherlock Holmes was not alive to discover it!

Following this Greek political circus, illegal immigrants “reconquered” parks and plazas in Athens after persecution of Golden Dawn
For years the city squares of Omonia, St Panteleimon and other neighborhoods in downtown Athens were considered “no-go zones” for native Greeks to walk after sunset. Violence, theft, and drugs brought by large congregations of illegal immigrants claimed numerous Greek victims, devastated local small businesses, and made it dangerous for Greeks to simply enjoy their own town. When Golden Dawners began to occupy these town squares they became local folk heroes, citizens have attested numerous times in English and Greek press that these actions drastically increased their quality of life.
However, in the 2 weeks since the beginning of the government and media persecution of Golden Dawn, the same ones who tormented Greek citizens before have “reconquered” the town squares. The absence of a political force that puts Greeks ahead of illegal aliens has caused a return to massive congregations of the latter throughout the parks and plazas of downtown Athens.
Only in the last two nights in the area of Agios Panteleimon, a hardly fathomable 714 people packed into its central plaza. In order to not draw the ire of citizens in these areas regarding the persecution of Golden Dawn, the Greek government has significantly upped a commanding police presence and made some token gestures at enforcing Greece’s existing immigration laws, with 87 arrests for the possession of fraudulent documents, yet 300,000 illegal aliens are still in Central Athens alone.
Source

German Scientists Freeze Light for a Minute

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 02:01 PM PDT

It turns out that the fastest known thing in the universe, light, can in fact be stopped. A German team of scientists have successfully stopped light from traveling for a whole minute. The record-breaking event could be a major breakthrough in the field of quantum memory storage.
So how did scientists freeze light for a whole minute, knowing that the speed of this electromagnetic radiation is 300 million meters per second? In one minute, light can actually travel 18 million kilometers (11 million miles), which makes the research team’s feat even more impressive.
The team at University of Darmstadt, led by George Heinze, pulled it off by using a process named electromagnetically induced transparency or EIT. More specifically, they used a quantum interference effect to turn an opaque medium transparent.
During the experiment, the German scientists shot a laser beam through the crystal, sending the atoms into a quantum superimposition of states and making it transparent. A second laser beam was then shot into the crystal, and the first beam was turned off, which consequently switched off the transparency. The result was that the second beam of light was trapped in the crystal for a whole minute.
The researchers also used the opportunity to successfully store and retrieve information from the light beam: a 100 micrometer picture of three horizontal stripes. This further proves that it is possible to imprint information on light beams, an essential step for quantum information processing.
Time of storage however depends on the superposition of the crystal, which can be extended with a magnetic field, but this also complicates the laser configuration. In order to trap light for one minute, the German team designed a specific algorithm to find the best laser and magnet combination for their experiment.
This is not the first time scientists freeze light successfully. The first experiment was conducted in 1999, when physicists slowed light down to 17 meters per second. In 2001, the University of Darmstadt team froze light for a fraction of a second and earlier this year, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers managed to keep it still for a total of 16 seconds, with the help of cold atoms.

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Somalia’s al-Shabab threatens to escalate attacks in Kenya

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 11:19 AM PDT

Somalia’s al-Shabab militant group has threatened to increase its deadly attacks against Kenya, days after they killed tens of people at a mall in the Kenyan capital.
The al-Shabab fighters vowed to transform Kenyan cities and towns into what they call grave yards, on Wednesday.
“We will strike Kenyans where it hurts the most, turn their cities into graveyards and rivers of blood will flow in Nairobi,” the militants said in a statement.
This comes after Kenya refused to pull its soldiers out of Somalia.
“The Kenyan government’s decision to keep its invading force in Somalia is an indication that they haven’t yet learnt any valuable lessons from the Westgate attacks.”
Late last month, nearly 70 people were killed after Somalia’s al-Shabab fighters stormed the Westgate mall, a shopping center popular with rich Kenyans and foreigners in Nairobi.
Dozens of others are reportedly still missing following the hostage-taking that took place in the building.
The group claimed responsibility for the attack. Al-Shabab leader Ahmed Godane said the raid was in retaliation for the Kenyan military’s invasion of southern Somalia in October 2011.
Kenya currently has over 4,000 army soldiers stationed in southern Somalia, where they have been battling the al-Shabab.
The Kenyan forces are part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) that gets training and equipment from the United States.
Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991, when warlords overthrew former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
However, MPs meeting in Mogadishu elected Hassan Sheikh Mohamud as the new president of Somalia with a big majority in September 2012.
The weak Western-backed government in Mogadishu has been battling al-Shabab fighters for more than six years and is propped up by the 10,000-strong AMISOM forces from Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, and Kenya.
Source

Will NASA launch Mars probe on time?

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 11:02 AM PDT

With NASA staff sent home and the Curiosity rover dozing off on Mars, former astronaut Tom Jones tells RT how the US government shutdown will affect the space agency’s projects and deadlines.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s 55th birthday celebrations on October 1 were marred as it [NASA] sustained one of the biggest blows of all the governmental agencies due to the stalemate in Congress.
Almost 97 percent of NASA’s workers are currently ‘furloughed’, with only 550 of its 18,000 employees continuing to execute official duties.
“It’s frustrating because everyone has deadlines,” Tom Jones, who completed four space shuttle flights before retiring in 2001, said. “Everyone has a schedule to keep and to be told to mark time and loose this time makes everyone feel that they’re not able to do their job. And people at NASA tend to be very dedicated, driven people, who want to make deadlines, who want to make projects go forward and so they find it frustrating just not to be able to work on them at all.”
“The very essential folks,” who remain in their jobs, are entitled to maintain operations related to the International Space Station and key science and communications satellites.
“The idea is to not lose any of the space operations, results, benefits, experiments and so forth,” the astronaut explained.

Though the data sent back from space won’t be analyzed, until the standoff over healthcare reforms ends in Congress and an agreement on funding for the new fiscal year is reached.
All the other NASA operations are suspended, with the agency’s internet portal saying: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. We sincerely regret this inconvenience.”
Even the Curiosity robotic rover, which made headlines by finding water on Mars, has stopped in its tracks after being put into “protective mode”.
There are fears that the government shutdown may also compromise future US space projects, including the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission.
The mission, which is set to launch on November 18 this year, may well be rescheduled for 2016 if it misses a three-month launch window.
According to Jones, MAVEN will blast off into space on the scheduled day.
“All of the NASA projects are going to be in delays now as of this shutdown. I hope it’s only a few days,” the 58-year-old said. “But the ones, which are heading towards an imminent launch, like the MAVEN probe to Mars, which is launching in November. That team is being kept active and that spacecraft is proceeding along its launch path. So, there won’t be any delay because the planets and their alignment won’t wait. And that launch window has to be met.”
The astronaut said that NASA was keeping in touch with the events in Congress and has been able to prepare for possible government shutdown if it lasts for “only few days”.
But the space agency “would be shocked if they saw three or four weeks of shutdown,” he stressed, because it would be bad for the employees’ morale, prevent important decisions on future launches from being made and cost money, which would make a severe impact on NASA’s programs considering “its limited budget.”
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