Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday, 30 January 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 29 Jan 2014 02:58 PM PST
The cemetery in Bavaria, Germany (A). The skeleton of a victim of the Plague of Justinian (C). Objects (E) from the grave (B) that helped scientists to estimate the plague victim’s death as occurring between 525 AD and 550 AD. A tooth from which the genome of the plague was extracted (D).
Scientists have reconstructed the genome of the first recorded bubonic plague and compared it to two later pandemics. New sophisticated strains of the disease that killed millions of Europeans in the Middle Ages could break out in future, they warn.
Researchers have managed to extract the DNA from the teeth of two victims of the Plague of Justinian, a pandemic that swept through the Byzantine Empire in AD 541-542, found in an early medieval cemetery in German Bavaria, according to a study published Tuesday by The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The Plague of Justinian is believed to have wiped out up to half the world’s known population at the time. The new research clearly links the Plague of Justinian with the Black Death bubonic plague, which was spread by rats in the 14th to 17th centuries, and a later pandemic in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The research shows that what caused all three pandemics was the same Yersina pestis (Y pestis) bacterium. However, the strains of the first pandemic are sufficiently different from those of the later pandemics to prompt a warning from scientists, who believe that the same bacteria with different DNA lineages is a worrying sign.
“These results show that rodent species worldwide represent important reservoirs for the repeated emergence of diverse lineages of Y pestis into human populations,” the study concludes.
Hendrik Poinar, director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Canada, who led the new research, believes scientists have to keep an eye on plague in rodent populations – the disease’s major carriers – to be able to avert future human outbreaks.
While modern-day antibiotics are able to stop currently known strains of plague, the researcher has not ruled out the possibility for potentially dangerous mutations. If there ever emerges an airborne version, the plague of that type could kill people within 24 hours of being infected, Poinar warned.
“If we happen to see a massive die-off of rodents somewhere with [the plague], then it would become alarming,” the scientist told AP.
The warning was echoed by Tom Gilbert, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who wrote an accompanying commentary for the study.
“What this shows is that the plague jumped into humans on several different occasions and has gone on a rampage,” he said. “That shows the jump is not that difficult to make and wasn’t a wild fluke.”
Plague, one of the world’s oldest known diseases, still remains endemic in mostly tropical and subtropical areas, according to the World Health Organization. A disease of rodents, it’s spread among them by fleas. Around 2,000 people a year get affected globally.
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Posted: 29 Jan 2014 02:50 PM PST

Fears of bank runs have escalated with the news that Russian lender ‘My Bank’ has banned all cash withdrawals until next week.
“Bloomberg reports that ‘My Bank’ – one of Russia’s top 200 lenders by assets – has introduced a complete ban on cash withdrawals until next week. While the Ruble has been losing ground rapidly recently, we suspect few have been expecting bank runs in Russia. Russia sovereign CDS had recently weakened to 4-month wides at 192bps,” reports Zero Hedge.
The source of the story is a person working inside the ‘My Bank’ call center, although officials for the bank have refused to comment.
On Saturday it emerged that HSBC was restricting large cash withdrawals for UK customers from £5000 upwards, forcing them to provide documentation of what they plan to spend the money on, a form of capital control that more and more banks are beginning to adopt.
This was followed by the story, which subsequently turned out to be false but caused market jitters nonetheless, that China’s commercial banks had been instructed to suspend cash transfers.
An IT glitch that prevented thousands of Lloyds Banking Group customers from withdrawing cash at ATMs in the UK also contributed to the concerns.
As we reported back in November, Chase Bank also recently imposed restrictions which prevent its customers from conducting over $50,000 in cash activity per month, as well as banning business customers from sending international wire transfers. Financial expert Gerald Celente said the news was a sign that Americans should prepare for a bank holiday.
Questions were already being asked of Chase after an incident last year when customers across the country attempted to withdraw cash from ATMs only to see that their account balance had been reduced to zero. The problem, which Chase attributed to a technical glitch, lasted for hours before it was fixed, prompting panic from some customers.
In November it was also reported that two of the biggest banks in America were stuffing their ATMs with 20-30 per cent more cash than usual in order to head off a potential bank run if the US defaults on its debt.
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Posted: 29 Jan 2014 02:34 PM PST

Approximately 2,300 years ago the ancient Chinese wrote the world’s oldest decimal multiplication table on bamboo sticks. According to experts, it was a very effective calculator that let one do the calculations not only with integers but also fractions. No country in the world had similar calculators at that time.
Five years ago, Beijing Tsinghua University received a gift of nearly two and a half thousand dirty and moldy bamboo sticks. Most likely, they were found by raiders of ancient tombs and then sold at a market in Hong Kong. According to radiocarbon analysis, this artifact was created in about 305 BC, which corresponds to China’s Warring States period.
Despite the military conflicts, this historical period (481, 475 or 453-221 BC) is characterized by flourishing trade and commerce, spread of iron tools, construction of large irrigation projects, development of agriculture, and population growth. At that time groups of educated citizens professionally engaged in intellectual work have emerged. The Warring States period is often identified with the “golden age” of Chinese philosophy. This period immediately preceded the formation of the Qin Empire.
According to the information on Nature portal, each strip is 12.7 mm wide and up to half a meter long. From top to bottom they are covered with ancient writing. According to Chinese historians, this important artifact has 65 ancient texts written in black ink. Due to the fact that the threads connecting pages into a single manuscript scroll have decayed, and some bamboo sticks have disappeared and others have been broken, the transcript of texts turned into a real puzzle for the researchers.
Scientists noticed a “canvas” consisting of 21 bamboo strips inscribed only with numbers. As suggested by Chinese mathematicians, it was the oldest known multiplication tables in the world. When the strips are placed properly, one will notice that the top line and the rightmost column contain the same 19 numbers arranged from right to left and top to bottom, respectively: 0.5, integers from one to nine, and the numbers dividable by 10, from 10 to 90.
Like in modern decimal multiplication table, the numbers at the intersection of each row and column are the results of multiplication of relevant numbers. The table can also be used to multiply any integer or integer and a half from 0.5 to 99.5. According to a working version, the numbers not represented in the table first have to be broken down into components. For example, 22.5 × 35.5 can be transformed as follows: (20 + 2 + 0.5) x ( 30 + 5 + 0.5 ). To solve this problem one should perform nine multiplications 20 × 30, 20 × 5 20 × 0.5, 2 × 30 and so on. The end result will be the sum of these results. This is quite an effective ancient calculator.
Science historians note the antiquity of Chinese mathematical practice, but are quite careful in the description of the mathematical theory of the ancient Chinese. Among the earliest known Chinese mathematical treatises there are “The Arithmetical Classic of the Gnomon” (Zhou Bi Suan Jing) and “Mathematical treatise in nine sections ” (Chiu Chang Suan Shu) that date back to 5-2 and 3-1 centuries BC, respectively. Some scientists mention possible contacts of Chinese mathematicians with Indian ones, but it happened much later, in 5-7 century.
Likely the discovered multiplication table was used by Chinese officials to calculate the area of land, counting crop yields or taxes. This calculator can also be used for division and extracting square roots. However, modern scientists are not sure whether such complex operations were performed in that era. In any event, according to the historian of mathematics at New York University Joseph Dauben, this is the earliest artifact of a decimal multiplication table in the world.
The American scientist is confident that the ancient Chinese used complex arithmetic in theoretical and commercial purposes in the era of the Warring States. This happened before the first emperor Ying Zheng who unified the entire China and took the title of Qin Shi Huang (first Huang of the Qin Dynasty). Later, he ordered to burn many books and banned private libraries in an attempt to reverse the country’s intellectual tradition.
Until now, a text dating back to the Qin Dynasty (221-206 years BC) was considered the oldest Chinese multiplication table. It is a series of short sentences, for example, “six eight forty eight.” It contained only the simplest multiplications. Multiplication tables of ancient Babylon are much older. They are approximately 4,000 years old, but a set of tables used for multiplication was bulky, with separate tables for multiplication by 1-20, 30 … 50
No calculations were possible without a large library of tables in Babylon. Furthermore, they did not have a decimal multiplication table. In Europe the first multiplication tables appeared only during the Renaissance era.
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Posted: 29 Jan 2014 02:26 PM PST
A large screen shows Cuba’s President Raul Castro speaking at the opening ceremony of the CELAC Summit in Havana, Cuba on January 28, 2014.
Cuban President Raul Castro has urged cooperation between Latin American and Caribbean nations without the involvement of the United States.
“We should establish a new regional and international cooperation paradigm,” Castro said in Havana on Tuesday in his keynote speech as the head of the host nation for the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC.
CELAC was created on December 3, 2011 in Venezuela’s capital Caracas by the country’s late leader Hugo Chavez to fight US influence in the region.
CELAC consists of 33 countries in the Americas and represents nearly 600 million people. It was believed to be an alternative to the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), founded in 1948, which had allegedly served Washington’s interests rather than those of the region.
The summit is centered on fighting poverty, inequality and hunger. According to the data released by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 28.2 percent of the region’s residents live in poverty and 11.3 percent in extreme poverty.
“In the context of CELAC, we have the possibility to create a model of our own making, adapted to our realities, based on the principles of mutual benefit,” Castro said.
He also censured US economic policies in the region.
“The so-called centers of power do not resign themselves to having lost control over this rich region, nor will they ever renounce attempts to change the course of history in our countries in order to recover the influence they have lost and benefit from their resources,” Castro stated.
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Posted: 29 Jan 2014 02:08 PM PST

The EU needs to start protecting its own citizens from the American global spying initiatives and quit being “hypocritical” when it comes to reforming its own data protection system, said the EU’s Justice Commissioner.
Viviane Reding, a vocal critic of American cyber surveillance, lashed out against EU member states’ reaction in wake of Edward Snowden revelations, urging the bloc to protect citizens’ private information and seek more legal assurances from Washington.
“There’s been a lot of hypocrisy in the debate,” Reding said at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels on Tuesday. “If the EU wants to be credible in its efforts to rebuild trust, if it wants to act as an example for other continents, it also has to get its own house in order.”
“The EU itself should also look carefully at some of its [data protection] laws. Neither the Commission, the Council, nor the European Parliament can be proud of the Data Retention Directive.”
The Directive requires telecom companies to store all telephony metadata, including geo-location data. Criticizing some aspects of the Directive, Reding said that the data “is kept for too long, it is too easily accessed and the risk of abuse is too great.”
“One cannot simply use ‘national security’ as a trump card and disregard citizens’ rights. That is what others used to do. The European Data Retention law needs a health check. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is the medicine,” she told the audience in Brussels.
EU member states are currently engaged in negotiations on a new data protection law which would require companies like Google, Facebook, or Twitter to ask for permission from authorities before using personal information. But governments have yet to agree on the wording as the EU Parliament threatens to block the law if privacy concerns are not properly addressed.
In particular, Reding criticized Britain over its role in helping the US spy overseas, warning that if allegations of the UK’s involvement in intercepting and storing personal data from fibre optic cables were true, she would launch “infringement proceedings”. While stating that EU has no power over its member’s national security operations, Reding called for a strong response.
“If I come across a single email, a single piece of evidence that the TEMPORA program [British spy agency GCHQ surveillance program] is not used purely for national security purposes, I will launch infringement proceedings. The mass collection of personal data is unacceptable.”
The European Commission wrote a letter to the UK government expressing its concerns about the scope of the TEMPORA program. The response was evidently not what Brussels had anticipated.
“The response was short: ‘Hands off, this is national security’,” Reding said.
At the same time, the EU’s justice chief urged the US to provide more legal safeguards to strengthen the Safe Harbour data privacy agreement. If such provisions were not met, Reding warned she would work to suspend the agreement that allows companies that gather consumer information in Europe to send it to the United States.
“For Safe Harbour to be fully roadworthy the US will have to service it,” she said. “Safe Harbour has to be strengthened or it will be suspended.”
Commenting on the latest leak that implicated the NSA and its UK counterpart, GCHQ, to have the ability to harvest sensitive personal data from phone apps that transmit users’ data across the web, such as the extremely popular Angry Birds game, Reding said:
“Now I know why the ‘Angry birds’ look so angry. Often with applications, the rule is ‘take it or leave it’. That’s when trust evaporates. That’s when people feel forced to part with their privacy.”
Reding also drew on the interconnected issues of data collection by private firms and spying activities by governments.
“Backdoors have been built, encryption has been weakened. Concerns about government surveillance drive consumers away from digital services.”
Private data should not be kept forever simply because storage has become cost-effective, Reding said. “Data should not be processed simply because algorithms are refined. Safeguards should apply and citizens should have rights.”
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Posted: 28 Jan 2014 02:05 PM PST


On January 28, at the meeting of the Federation Council dedicated to XXII Christmas Readings, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill demanded Russian senators thwart any aspirations to legalize same-sex marriages in Russia.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman that is concluded for procreation. The ROC stands firmly for traditional Christian values, Kirill said.
The Patriarch said that rejection of gay marriage was inherent in Christian doctrine. Russia, contrary to the opinion of some individuals, lives according to Christian standards and will not cease to be a secular state, as required by the constitution, but will be a “prudent trustee.”
Last summer, the Patriarch stated that the legalization of same-sex marriage abroad was a dangerous apocalyptic symbol.
Earlier in 2012, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church urged believers to fight “false values ​​of aggressive liberalism” that the enemies of the Church adopted. Gay marriage was called one of such values . Do you think that gay marriage destroys society?
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Posted: 28 Jan 2014 01:51 PM PST
Legislators participate in a plenary session of the National Assembly in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, Jan. 9, 2014.
Nicaragua’s National Assembly has approved constitutional amendments that will allow presidents of the Central American country to be reelected indefinitely.
On Tuesday, the lawmakers voted for the changes a second time as required for them to become law. The amendments passed the first hurdle in December last year.
National Assembly President Rene Nunez, a member of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front, said the changes were approved the second time by an easy 64 to 25 vote. Sixty-three of the 92 MPs belong to the ruling party.
The new law, which overturns a 1995 law limiting a president to two terms, will pave the way for socialist President Daniel Ortega to seek reelection in 2016.
Opposition lawmakers, who voted against the amendment, said the move is designed to keep 68-year-old Ortega, a prominent Cold War antagonist of the United States, in power for life. The reform will go into effect once signed by Ortega.
Ortega, a leader of the leftist guerrilla movement that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza in a revolution, first took power in 1979 and was formally elected president for a single term in 1984. He has been president since 2007.
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Posted: 28 Jan 2014 01:25 PM PST

Actor Alec Baldwin was furious yesterday after the Transportation Security Administration singled his 5-month-old daughter out as a potential terrorist.
The 30 Rock star was apparently traveling back to the United States from the Bahamas when his infant daughter was “randomly selected” for an enhanced screening.
Despite numerous vows to curtail his use of the service, the Beetlejuice cast member took to Twitter to relieve his anger.
“Flying from Nassau, Bahamas 2 NY. TSA ‘random selects’ my 5 month old daughter 4 a pat down. I am not kidding,” Baldwin tweeted, adding#travelinginUSisadisgrace in case anybody was unclear of his sentiments.
Baldwin provided additional clarification in a follow-up tweet: “I guess what I’m saying is: Traveling in the US is a pain in the f%#&ing ass.”
Baldwin’s experience is one far too familiar to U.S. travelers, but at least screeners were kind enough not to strip his daughter naked.
As we reported earlier this month, Russian TV celebrity Sobchak recounted a horrific TSA tale, in which she claimed she was “stripped naked” and searched by a female agent while traveling through Miami International Airport.
Susie Castillo, 2003′s Miss USA, was also angered to tears following her ordeal with the TSA after a screener allegedly fondled her vagina during an intrusive pat-down at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
Perhaps if Baldwin had been more vocal about his protest of the TSA’s security measures beforehand he wouldn’t have had this problem.
Engineer and blogger Jon Corbett – the first American to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the TSA’s groping and body scanners – was recently surprised to learn he was awarded “TSA Pre✓” status, an official security exemption apparently being implemented randomly for “trusted travelers.”
However, he says he never asked, applied or opted-in to be a pre-check member.
“That’s right — the guy who sues, publicly humiliates, and fights the TSA before Congress now has TSA PreCheck,” Corbett recently wrote on his blog.
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Posted: 28 Jan 2014 01:07 PM PST

Famous American whistleblower Edward Snowden faces assassination attempts by the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, a former security officer tells Press TV.
Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency (NSA) officer, said the threat has increased after the failed attempts to kidnap Snowden, who gained fame due to his revelations about NSA spying activities.
“In early December 2013, I reported on Russia’s Channel One news network that Snowden was the target of a possible kidnapping attempt back then by the MI6 officers – British intelligence officers with the British Embassy in Moscow,” he said.
But, he added, the US officials failed to kidnap Snowden with the help of the MI6 “and bring him back to the United States either directly or through the United Kingdom.”
“And now they’ve gone to the other scenario where they’d like to just put him out, make him go away by assassinating him,” said Madsen.
He added that Russia, where Snowden has been granted asylum, is now “the safest country” for the whistleblower.
Madsen said the Russian government can provide enough security for Snowden.
Fearing for his life, Snowden fled the US — before disclosing the information on the National Security Agency’s spying operations — first to Hong Kong and then to Russia where he was granted temporary asylum last summer.
Snowden’s revelations have caused uproar in the US regarding privacy rights. They have also angered many US allies whose leaders were targeted by the NSA.
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Posted: 28 Jan 2014 12:28 PM PST

Legalization of marijuana for recreational and medical use in 20 US states has seen a boom in cannabis-oriented businesses. Experts say the market can jump to $10.2 billion by 2018, warning of a possible repetition of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s.
The legal pot industry in the US might be making its first steps, but anyone trying to capitalize on its growth may find the “virgin” market overheating.
Gone are the days when a few entrepreneurs were helping pot legalization enthusiasts raise money for their projects. The marijuana market is now swarming with investors ready to risk money buying into cannabis industry companies.
It is already developing its own advertisement, insurance, logistics and security services. After Colorado marijuana shops got $1 million on the first day of legal sales, the question of profitability appears to be settled.
The legal marijuana market is expected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $2.3 billion in 2014, predicts ArcView Market Research. It forecasts the legal marijuana market reaching $10.2 billion by 2018.
When the Wall Street Journal publishes articles discussing fantastic pot shop revenues, companies like Seattle-based Privateer Holdings, which pioneered the financial market for cannabis industry in 2010, are feeling the growing competitiveness within the industry.
Though the federal Controlled Substances Act still lists marijuana as a prohibited Schedule I drug, President Barack Obama has practically blessed the cannabis industry, saying that smoking marijuana is “not very different from the cigarettes” and “no more dangerous than alcohol”, and US authorities are likely to treat the industry like any other legal business.
Last week the Obama administration announced that marijuana-related businesses should have access to the US banking system despite the fact that marijuana still remains illegal under federal law. This might help US authorities get better control of the money flowing into the newborn industry which is currently operating solely on a cash basis.
It is unlikely that once legalized the pot industry could be reversed, as further legalization of marijuana in the US directly correlates with the results of future elections.
The web is full of articles proclaiming “marijuana industry boom” and interviews with those harvesting first millions from the initial cannabis market surge.
Yet even the pot market “sharks” warn that this business is much more complicated than it appears. No one can predict when the period of enthusiastic pot start-ups would end, giving way to big business with really big money, just like it happened with the dot-com bubble in the 1990s, which exploded to clear the turf for transnational corporations like Amazon, Google and Facebook.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 12:18