Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Saturday, 15 March 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 14 Mar 2014 03:54 PM PDT

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU) states that Aerospace Defence Forces (VKO) experts remain “puzzled” as to why the United States Navy “captured and then diverted” a Malaysia Airlines civilian aircraft from its intended flight-path to their vast and highly-secretive Indian Ocean base located on the Diego Garcia atoll.
According to this report, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (also marketed as China Southern Airlines flight 748 through a codeshare) was a scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China, when on 8 March this Boeing 777-200ER aircraft “disappeared” in flight with 227 passengers on board from 15 countries, most of whom were Chinese, and 12 crew members.
Interesting to note, this report says, was that Flight 370 was already under GRU “surveillance” after it received a “highly suspicious” cargo load that had been traced to the Indian Ocean nation Republic of Seychelles, and where it had previously been aboard the US-flagged container ship MV Maersk Alabama.

What first aroused GRU suspicions regarding the MV Maersk Alabama, this report continues, was that within 24-hours of off-loading this “highly suspicious” cargo load bound for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the two highly-trained US Navy Seals assigned to protect it, Mark Daniel Kennedy, 43, and Jeffrey Keith Reynolds, 44, were found dead under “suspicious circumstances.”
Both Kennedy and Reynolds, this report says, were employed by the Virginia Beach, Virginia-based maritime security firm The Trident Group which was founded by US Navy Special Operations Personnel (SEAL’s) and Senior US Naval Surface Warfare Officers and has long been known by the GRU to protect vital transfers of both atomic and biological materials throughout the world.

Upon GRU “assests” confirming that this “highly suspicious” cargo was aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on 8 March, this report notes, Moscow notified China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) of their concerns and received “assurances” that “all measures” would be taken as to ascertain what was being kept so hidden when this aircraft entered into their airspace.
However, this report says, and as yet for still unknown reasons, the MSS was preparing to divert Flight 370 from its scheduled destination of Beijing to Haikou Meilan International Airport (HAK) located in Hainan Province (aka Hainan Island).
Prior to entering the People Liberation Army (PLA) protected zones of the South China Sea known as the Spratly Islands, this report continues, Flight 370 “significantly deviated” from its flight course and was tracked by VKO satellites and radar flying into the Indian Ocean region and completing its nearly 3,447 kilometer (2,142 miles) flight to Diego Garcia.
Critical to note about Flight 370’s flight deviation, GRU experts in this report say, was that it occurred during the same time period that all of the Spratly Island mobile phone communications operated by China Mobile were being jammed.

China Mobile, it should be noted, extended phone coverage in the Spratly Islands in 2011 so that PLA soldiers stationed on the islands, fishermen, and merchant vessels within the area would be able to use mobile services, and can also provide assistance during storms and sea rescues.
As to how the US Navy was able to divert Flight 370 to its Diego Garcia base, this report says, appears to have been accomplished remotely as this Boeing 777-200ER aircraft is equipped with a fly-by-wire (FBW) system that replaces the conventional manual flight controls of an aircraft with an electronic interface allowing it to be controlled like any drone-type aircraft.
However, this report notes, though this aircraft can be controlled remotely, the same cannot be said of its communication systems which can only be shut down manually; and in the case of Flight 370, its data reporting system was shut down at 1:07 a.m., followed by its transponder (which transmits location and altitude) which was shut down at 1:21 a.m.
What remains “perplexing” about this incident, GRU analysts in this report say, are why the American mainstream media outlets have yet to demand from the Obama regime the radar plots and satellite images of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea regions as the US military covers this entire area from Diego Garcia like no other seas in the world due to its vital shipping and air lanes.
Most sadly, this report concludes, the US is actually able to conceal the reason(s) for the “disappearance” of Flight 370 as they have already done so after the events of 11 September 2011 when the then Bush regime “disappeared” American Airlines Flight 77 and its 64 passengers and crew after falsely claiming it hit the Pentagon, but which was confirmed by the CNN News Service [see video HERE] not to have happened.
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Posted: 14 Mar 2014 03:48 PM PDT
Britain’s opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.
Britain’s opposition Labour Party leader has pledged to hold a vote on the country’s membership of the European Union only if more powers are transferred to Brussels.
On Tuesday, Ed Miliband said he would announce his strategy regarding the vote in detail during a speech on Wednesday.
“I am announcing that the next Labour government will legislate for a new lock: there would be no transfer of powers from the UK to the EU without a referendum on our continued membership of the EU,” he said.
This means that if Labour wins the election in 2015, there will be little possibility for a referendum on the membership at least until 2020.
“It is important to emphasize that there are no current proposals – from either the EU or any member state – for a further transfer of powers from Britain,” Miliband said.
In January 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU during the early part of the next parliament, by the end of 2017 at the latest, if his Conservative party wins the 2015 general election.
The British premier made the promise under pressure from Tory Eurosceptic backbenchers and the UK Independence Party.
This comes as a recent poll, published on January 12, found that most Britons prefer the UK to stay in the EU and try to shrink Brussels’ powers.
According to the survey, conducted by Ipsos MORI for think-tank British Future, about 38 percent of Britons believe the UK should stay in the bloc and try to reduce the EU’s powers, while some 28 percent want the country to leave the EU.
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Posted: 14 Mar 2014 03:40 PM PDT
Startling theory: US counter-terrorism officials are concerned as to why Malaysian Airlines flight 370 remained airborne for four hours after it vanished from radar based on data transmitted from its engines. Pictured are crew members of a Chinese Air Force aircraft.
US investigators think that Malaysian Airlines flight 370 remained airborne for four more hours after vanishing from its last recorded position – raising the startling prospect the plane could have been hijacked.
Officials suspect that the plane flew for a total of five hours based on data automatically downloaded from the Boeing 777′s Rolls Royce engines and sent back to the ground as part of a routine monitoring program.
US counter-terrorism teams are now pursuing the astonishing possibility that the plane and its 239 passengers were diverted to an undisclosed location ‘with the intention of using it later for another purpose’.
The Wall Street Journal broke the new developments after talking with two unofficial sources familiar with the American investigation – raising a whole new raft of questions about what happened to the jet which disappeared seemingly without trace from radar at around 1.30 am early on Saturday morning en-route to Beijing.
Government terrorism experts are now examining the possibility that the pilot or somebody else turned the plane’s transponders off to avoid detection and flew it to another country.
A total flight time of five hours upon leaving Kuala Lumpur means that the Boeing 777 would have been able to remain airborne for an additional 2,200 nautical miles at its air-speed – which put the border of Pakistan and the Arabian Sea within its reach.
While the Wall Street Journal said it isn’t clear whether investigators have evidence of terrorism or hijacking – they have not ruled it out.
A senior Malaysia Airlines official told Reuters that no such data existed, while a second official said he was unaware of it. A spokeswoman for engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce had no immediate comment.
Malaysia Airlines has said previously that the Rolls-Royce Trent engines stopped transmitting monitoring signals when contact with the plane was lost.
However, officials are working on the suspicion that the plane’s engines were operating for four more hours following its last recorded sighting on radar.
This has caused enormous uncertainty over the final destination of the aircraft – in addition to why it flew for so long without operating its transponders.
One working theory from counter-terror officials is that the plane was taken over for an as-yet unknown purpose.
Uncertainty: Passengers look at a Malaysian Airline planes at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia, on 13 March 2014. Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with 239 people on board went missing early 08 March 2014 while on its way to Beijing under mysterious circumstances.
The Wall Street Journal said that this scenario – previously only discussed in the media as one of a number of conspiracy theories – was brought to national security officials and senior personnel from the appropriate US agencies.
At one of these briefings, officials were told that terror investigators were actively examining if flight 370 had been commandeered ‘to be used later for another purpose’.
Of course, the mystery of the whereabouts of the aircraft continues – and it remains unclear if the plane crashed hundreds of miles from its last known location or indeed landed at an alternate destination.
As part of maintenance agreements between Rolls Royce and Malaysian Airlines, the engines transmit live data to its global engine health monitoring center in Derby, UK for analysis every 30 minutes.
Investigators have used this information to try to establish the activities of flight 370 after its transponders ceased to work en-route to Beijing, half way across the Gulf of Thailand.
Six days on and a massive international air and water search involving 10 nations using 56 surface ships have failed to find a single piece of debris or sign of the Malaysian Airlines aircraft.
Hopes of a resolution were briefly raised when a Chinese state agency released satellite images of three pieces of large debris floating near to the jets last recorded position in the South China sea.
These were dashed early on Thursday morning when Vietnamese and Malaysian authorities said they found no trace at the co-ordinates.
‘There is nothing. We went there, there is nothing,’ Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief said on Thursday morning.
Vietnam had already searched the area where Chinese satellites showed objects that could be debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet but a plane was sent to check the area again, Vietnamese military officials said.
‘We are aware and we sent planes to cover that area over the past three days,’ Deputy Transport Minister Pham Quy Tieu told Reuters. ‘Today a military plane will search the area again,’ he said.
And on Thursday morning Vietnamese authorities said two military jets searching for clues top the missing Malaysia Airlines jet found no wreckage at the location.
Aircraft repeatedly circled the area over the South China Sea but were unable to detect any objects, said a Reuters journalist, who flew aboard a Antonov 26 cargo plane for three hours.
What at first seemed a potentially crucial development on the fifth day of the search even appeared to corroborate the testimony of a New Zealand oil worker who claimed he witnessed the crash of the missing airplane early on Saturday morning.
More-so the satellite images were captured in the original search area under the flight’s original path and appeared to discount the theory that the aircraft turned back towards Malaysia and crashed hundreds of miles away on the other side of the Malaysian peninsula.
Rig worker Michael Jerome McKay described seeing what he believes to be the plane burning – in one piece for 10-15 seconds – flying at a high altitude slightly off from the standard route of planes that cross the sea shortly after the plane vanished.
‘There was no lateral movement, so it was either coming toward our location, stationary, or going away from our location,’ he wrote in a letter to his employers about the sighting on Saturday and seen by ABC News.
Deputy general director of Vietnam’s air traffic management, Doan Huu Gia, confirmed he had been sent an email from McKay, the BBC reported.
‘We received an email from a New Zealander who works on one of the oil rigs off Vung Tau.
‘He said he spotted a burning [object] at that location, some 300 km southeast of Vung Tau.’
False hope for resolution: This image released by Chinese authorities was initially billed as the crash site of what could be Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 – this was later refuted by authorities.
Debris: The crucial discovery of the debris was made on March 9 – the day after Malaysian Airlines flight 370 went missing – however Malaysian and Vietnamese authorities said they could not locate any trace of the aircraft or debris.
China meanwhile has heaped pressure on Malaysia to improve its coordination over the search for the Boeing 777, which disappeared early on Saturday on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Of the 239 people on board, up to 154 were Chinese.
Premier Li Keqiang, speaking at a news conference in Beijing, demanded that the ‘relevant party’ step up coordination while China’s civil aviation chief said he wanted a ‘smoother’ flow of information from Malaysia, which has come under heavy criticism for its handling of the disaster.
Vietnamese and Malaysian planes scanned waters where a Chinese government agency website said a satellite had photographed three ‘suspicious floating objects’ on Sunday. The location was close to where the plane, Flight MH370, lost contact with air traffic control.
The Malaysians are understood to be furious with China for not releasing the images earlier.
Mr Azharuddin said that China had still not officially provided the airline with the images.
‘I learned about this from the news this morning,’ he said.
One U.S. official close to the plane investigation said the Chinese satellite report was a ‘red herring’.
It was the latest in a series of false signals given to the multi-national search team that has been combing 27,000 square nautical miles, an area the size of Hungary, for the Boeing 777-200ER.
Tuesday: On March 11 a military source claimed the plane was tracked over the Strait of Malacca – before the release of the Chinese satellite imagery. Pictured are staff members at the rescue command office for the missing flight.
On Wednesday, Malaysia’s air force chief said military radar had traced what could have been the jetliner to an area south of the Thai holiday island of Phuket, hundreds of miles to the west of its last known position.
His statement followed a series of conflicting accounts of the flight path of the plane, which left authorities uncertain even which sea to search in for Flight MH370.
The last definitive sighting on civilian radar screens came shortly before 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, less than an hour after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, as it flew northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand.
What happened next remains one of the most baffling puzzles in modern aviation history and the differing accounts put out by various Malaysian officials have drawn criticism of their handling of the crisis.
‘The Malaysians deserve to be criticized – their handling of this has been atrocious,’ said Ernest Bower, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Rodzali Daud, the Malaysian air force chief, told a news conference on Wednesday that an aircraft was plotted on military radar at 2:15 a.m., 200 miles northwest of Penang Island off Malaysia’s west coast at the northern tip of the Strait of Malacca.
But there has been no confirmation that the unidentified plane was Flight MH370, Rodzali said, and Malaysia was sharing the data with international civilian and military authorities, including those from the United States.
‘We are corroborating this,’ he added. ‘We are still working with the experts.’
According to the data cited by Rodzali, if the radar had spotted the missing plane, the aircraft would have flown for 45 minutes and dropped only about 5,000 feet in altitude since its sighting on civilian radar in the Gulf of Thailand.
There was no word on which direction it was then headed, but if this sighting was correct, the plane would have turned sharply west from its original course, travelling hundreds of miles over the Malay Peninsula from the Gulf of Thailand to the Andaman Sea.
This would put it about 200 miles northwest of Penang, in the northern part of the Strait of Malacca, roughly south of Phuket and east of the tip of Indonesia’s Aceh province and India’s Nicobar island chain.
Indonesia and Thailand have said their militaries detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace. Malaysia has asked India for help in tracing the aircraft and New Delhi’s coastguard planes have joined the search.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement that its experts in air traffic control and radar who travelled to Kuala Lumpur over the weekend were giving the Malaysians technical help in the search.
A U.S. official in Washington said the experts were shown two sets of radar records, military and civilian, and they both appeared to show the plane turning to the west and across the Malay peninsula.
But the official stressed the records were raw data returns that were not definitive.
A dozen countries are taking part in the search, with 42 ships and 39 aircraft involved.
Authorities have not ruled out any possible cause for the plane’s disappearance. Malaysian police have said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.
Two men on board were discovered by investigators to have false passports, but they were apparently seeking to emigrate illegally to the West.
The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6 last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall with its undercarriage on landing in San Francisco, killing three people.
Boeing Co, the U.S. aircraft company that makes the 777, has declined to comment beyond a brief statement saying it was monitoring the situation.
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Posted: 14 Mar 2014 03:35 PM PDT
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key says the island country is set to hold a vote within the next three years on changing the design of the national flag.
In a speech at Victoria University in the capital Wellington on Tuesday, Key announced plans to hold the referendum by 2017 on replacing the current flag with a new design.
The New Zealand ensign features the Union Jack in the top left corner with four stars of the Southern Cross in red with white outlines on a blue background.
The premier, however, said he wants to scrap the flag ”dominated by the United Kingdom” and change it to a black one with a silver fern on it.
“It’s my belief, and I think one increasingly shared by many New Zealanders, that the design of the New Zealand flag symbolizes a colonial and post-colonial era whose time has passed,” he said.
Any change in the country’s 112-year-old ensign is expected to abolish the Union Jack from the top left quadrant.
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Posted: 14 Mar 2014 03:23 PM PDT

Russia is ready to retaliate with counter sanctions against the EU and US if they go ahead with economic measures against Russia over tension in Crimea, the Russian Economic Ministry has said.
“We hope that there will only be targeted political sanctions, and not a broad package affecting economic trade,” Deputy Economic Development Minister Aleksey Likhachev said.
“Our sanctions will be, of course, similar,” he added.
One way Russia plans on shielding itself from pending sanctions is by boosting trade in other currencies, not the US dollar.
“We need to increase trade volume conducted in national currencies. Why, in relation to China, India, Turkey and other countries, should we be negotiating in dollars? Why should we do that? We should sign deals in national currencies- this applies to energy, oil, gas, and everything else,” Alexey Ulyukaev, the Minister of Economic Development said in an interview with the Vesti 24 TV Channel.
The Duma, Russia’s parliament, is drafting legislation to allow Moscow to freeze assets of Western companies and individuals in the event sanctions are imposed following the Crimea referendum vote on March 16.
The bill would give “the president and government opportunities to defend our sovereignty from threats,” according to its author, Andrey Klishas, as quoted by RIA Novosti on March 5.
The US Congress has already denounced Russia’s actions in Ukraine. On Tuesday, lawmakers passed a resolution that urges the US to “to work with our European allies and other countries to impose visa, financial, trade and other sanctions on senior Russian Federation officials, majority state-owned banks and commercial organizations, and other state agencies, as appropriate.”
Earlier this week the European Union threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia starting on March 17, after the referendum in Crimea takes place on Sunday.
The decision on sanctions was made, “especially on the procedure of introducing sanctions,” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said. “The consequence of this will be the start of sanctions on Monday,” he added.
However, China’s ambassador to Germany Shi Mingde, warns of the global economic affect sanctions against Russia could hold. Mingde said the geo-political tiff between Russia and the West could “spiral” into chaos.
President Putin and the foreign ministry have both said sanctions against Russia could backfire, and spill over into the global economy.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced any Western-led sanctions as “hasty and ill-considered”, and President Putin said squeezing economically would cause “mutual damage”.
If extreme Iran-style sanctions are imposed on Russian exports, the EU would be much more exposed than the US.
Europe imports nearly one third of its gas from resource-rich Russia, and some countries are completely dependent on Russian gas.
While the US and Russia trade very little, Russia is Europe’s biggest customer, and the $13 trillion economy would suffer if trade with Russia was halted overnight.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 20:36