Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday, 3 March 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 02 Mar 2014 02:53 PM PST

On Sunday Republicans mounted attacks against President Obama over what they consider his inappropriate response to the crisis in Ukraine.
Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russians have “been running circles around us.”
“Putin is playing chess, and I think we are playing marbles — and I don’t think it’s even close,” he said.
“I believe it’s the naïve position of the National Security Council and the president’s advisers that, if we just keep giving things to Russia, they’ll wake up and say, ‘the United States is not that bad,’” Rogers said. “That is completely missing the motivations of why Russia does what Russia does.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNN “we have a weak and indecisive president,” and Obama’s lack of bellicose response “invites aggression.”
“None of us should be under any illusion about what President Putin is capable of doing in Ukraine,” said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, in a statement. “Every moment that the United States and our allies fail to respond sends the signal to President Putin that he can be even more ambitious and aggressive in his military intervention in Ukraine.”
“Every moment that the United States and our allies fail to respond sends the signal to President Putin that he can be even more ambitious and aggressive in his military intervention in Ukraine,” McCain said in a statement. “There is a range of serious options at our disposal at this time without the use of military force. I call on President Obama to rally our European and NATO allies to make clear what costs Russia will face for its aggression and to impose those consequences without further delay.”
On Saturday the junior senator from Florida, Republican Marco Rubio, took to the pages of Politico to condemn Putin and Russia. “This is a critical moment in world history,” he ominously warned. “The credibility of the alliances and security assurances that have preserved the international order is at stake. If Putin’s illegal actions are allowed to stand unpunished, it will usher in a dark and dangerous era in world affairs.”
Rubio enumerated eight steps required “to punish Russia,” including convening an emergency meeting of NATO, boycotting the planned G8 meeting in Sochi, and adding Russian officials to the Magnitsky list, which imposes travel bans and other sanctions.
Rep. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said the decision by the upper house of the Russian Duma to respond militarily to protect Russia’s interests in Ukraine is an act “of aggression that violate Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” He demanded the U.S. ambassador to Rusia be recalled and members of the Putin government have their assets frozen and visas revoked. Cotton said the United States should supply military assistance to Ukraine immediately.
“Vladimir Putin is seizing a neighboring territory — again — so President Obama must lead a meaningful, unified response,” said the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. He called for immediate sanctions against Russia.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said last week Russia should be booted out of the Group of Eight, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations Security Council.
“As the President and his national security team are apparently the last to learn, Putin has scant regard for international norms when they run counter to his goal of re-establishing Soviet-style regional hegemony over unfortunate states like Georgia and Ukraine who have the temerity to want a more free, prosperous future for their people,” the Texas Republican said. “And Putin is under no illusions that the President’s vague threats mean any more than his infamous ‘red line’ in the Syrian desert.”
“The United States should stand with Ukraine,” he said.

Republicans are not alone. Democrats are also calling for action against Russia.
Rep. Eliot L. Engel, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, posted a statement on his web page Saturday. Engel said “the international community should support Ukraine’s interim government in its efforts to restore order and return Ukraine to political and economic health. The United States and our allies must be ready to help, which is why I support a robust international economic assistance package and the Administration’s proposal to provide U.S. loan guarantees and other assistance to Ukraine. Today, Ukraine faces formidable challenges, but its people should know that the United States stands with them.”
Michigan Democrat Senator Carl Levin, who heads up the Armed Services Committee, proposed placing “a significant number of international observers on the ground in Ukraine. He said the presence of observers “could reduce the risk that Russia would make a false claim of provocative acts by Ukraine as an excuse for further violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, and thereby help avoid a conflict that nobody should want.”
Russia says it has moved into the semi-autonomous Crimea peninsula to safeguard Russian-speaking Ukrainians from a nationalist coup government in Kyiv.
Soon after taking power, the Verkhovan Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, abolished a law enacted in 2012 allowing regions of the country to officially use languages in addition to Ukrainian if they were spoken by over 10 percent of the population. Nearly half of the country’s regions, primarily those in the eastern part of the country, have adopted Russian as a second language.
Prior to the Euromaidan coup, Putin adviser Dmitry Peskov said Russia was concerned about growing Russophobia in the country.
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Posted: 02 Mar 2014 06:36 AM PST

Official figures show that unemployment in the European Union (EU) has increased during the 12-month period ending in January 2014, with around 26 million people jobless in both the EU and the eurozone, Press TV reports.
The EU statistical agency, Eurostat, said in its latest report that unemployment in the EU rose by 17,000 over the one-year time span.
More than 26 million people of working age were jobless in January, over 19 million of whom were citizens of 18 Eurozone countries, Eurostat added.
“You do not have a future without a job,” a concerned Belgian citizen told Press TV.
The Eurostat figures show that 5.5 million adults under the age of 25 are unemployed in the EU. The data also indicates that six out of every ten young people are on the dole in Greece. The situation is almost as bad in Spain and Croatia.
Unemployment increased in 13 EU member states during the 12-month period, with the highest increases being recorded in Greece with 28.0 percent, and Spain with 25.8 percent.
Among the EU member states, the lowest unemployment rates were recorded in Austria with 4.9 percent, Germany with 5.0 percent and Luxembourg with 6.1 percent.
The Eurozone jobless rate currently stands at 12 percent.
Critics say the current figures are evidence that European politicians have failed to tackle the issue of unemployment.
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Posted: 02 Mar 2014 06:32 AM PST

Former presidential advisor says “soft corruption” will lead to domestic disorder.
Pollster and former presidential advisor Pat Caddell warns that the rise of “soft oppression” and corruption in the United States will facilitate a violent Kiev-style uprising in the streets of America.
“What we’re seeing in the world… in Kiev… is American values at work. These people and the rest of the world are saying ‘we’re not putting up with this and we’ll put our lives on it,’” Caddell told Fox News.
“In this country a populace equally dissatisfied with its political class and its leadership. We don’t have the same overt oppression, but we have a very soft oppression of complacency and corruption,” he added.
Caddell then made the bold claim that the jaw-dropping scenes of rioting and near civil war witnessed over the past few weeks on the streets of Kiev were coming to America.
“And the American people… what you’re seeing there… they need their own outlet for that… it is a warning… because it’s coming,” said Caddell.
This isn’t the first time that Caddell has warned that the increasingly corrupt and onerous actions of the federal government are threatening to spark domestic disorder.
Following a 2011 Rasmussen poll which found that just 17 per cent of Americans believe that the U.S. government had the consent of the governed, Caddell asserted that Americans’ lack of confidence in their leadership is so fervent that they are now “pre-revolutionary.”
It would be naive to think that the innumerable riots, mass demonstrations and political uprisings across Europe and the middle east over the past three years have gone unnoticed by the federal government.
As we reported earlier this month, some fear that the U.S. Army’s construction of a $96 million dollar ‘fake town’ in Virginia is part of long standing preparations to drill for martial law in America.
In 2012, an academic study about the future use of the military as a peacekeeping force within the United States written by a retired Army Colonel depicted a shocking scenario in which the U.S. Army is used to restore order to a town that has been seized by Tea Party “insurrectionists”.
The study dovetailed with a leaked U.S. Army manual which revealed plans for the military to carry out “Civil Disturbance Operations” during which troops would be used domestically to quell riots, confiscate firearms and even kill Americans on U.S. soil during mass civil unrest.
Fort Hood soldiers are also being taught by their superiors that Christians, Tea Party supporters and anti-abortion activists represent a radical terror threat, mirroring rhetoric backed by the Department of Homeland Security which frames “liberty lovers” as domestic extremists.
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Posted: 02 Mar 2014 05:32 AM PST

American exceptionalism has gone into overdrive with stern warnings from US President Barack Obama to Russia to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and to not destabilize the region.
By “American exceptionalism” we mean Washington’s seemingly unlimited capacity for exceptional arrogance and double think.
Obama has not yet accused Russia outright of “military invasion” in the crisis-torn country, but that was the clear inference from his weekend press conference. In a veiled threat of military confrontation, the American president warned that there would be “costs” for Moscow.
“Any violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity will be deeply destabilizing and the US stands with the international community to affirm that there will be costs [for this violation],” said Obama in a hastily arranged media statement in Washington on Friday.
The White House is obviously rattled by reports of Russian troop movements across Ukraine’s southern Crimean Peninsula. Moscow says that its military presence in the autonomous Crimean republic of Ukraine is fully in accord with a long-standing legal agreement to have its soldiers stationed there as part of its Black Sea naval base.
That agreement was renewed in 2010 between Moscow and Kiev for a further 20 years, affording Russian military presence in the Crimea, particularly the naval base at Sevastopol, which is headquarters for Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
Russian ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin denied that Russia had invaded Ukraine’s territory and said, “We are operating under this agreement [with Ukraine].”
Events in Crimea took on a chaotic twist in recent days when unknown armed men took over the local parliament and the Russian flag was hoisted. There were also other reports of large troop deployments at the main civilian airport and other facilities. Soldiers were not wearing identifiable uniforms, but there were unconfirmed reports that armored vehicles bore Russian military insignia.
Under the existing military lease of the naval base at Crimea’s Sevastopol, Russia is permitted to station thousands of troops on the Peninsula, and Moscow has in the past routinely engaged in maneuvers there.
However, it is stretching naivety to believe Moscow’s claims that the recent surge in military movements is merely “routine”. The Crimean activity coincides with other large-scale mobilization of Russian troops as well as military aircraft on Russia’s broader border with Ukraine.
But here’s the laughable irony of Obama’s protestations. The latest apparent Russian military moves follow months of US-sponsored destabilization in Ukraine. This illegal and covert American interference has trampled all over Ukrainian sovereignty, which ironically Obama is now accusing his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of doing.
Since Ukraine spurned a tentative trade agreement with the European Union at the end of last November, street protests have escalated in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. Washington and its European allies, including Britain, France and Germany, have done everything to escalate these protests, from high-profile political statements to clandestine military infiltration through the organs of the CIA. The demonstrations in Kiev quickly took on a quasi-military character with sinister fascist elements using firearms and other forms of violence to seize and occupy government buildings. That rapidity betrays the pre-meditated external nature of the “protests”.
There are reliable reports that many of the deaths in clashes between Ukrainian police and protesters were actually caused by Western-backed provocateurs and snipers in a deliberate attempt to inflame the crisis. Washington has infiltrated Ukraine with the CIA and a myriad other so-called “non-governmental organizations” since the early 1990s – with the objective of agitating regime change in the former Soviet Republic.
US State Department official Victoria Nuland recently disclosed that Washington has “invested” some $5 billion in “promoting democracy” (that is, subversion and sedition) in Ukraine over the past two decades.
The crisis came to a head when the embattled elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled suddenly from his office last week and went into exile in Russia. The Ukrainian parliament has since been taken over by his Western-backed opponents and a new interim government installed. Washington and Brussels swiftly moved to recognize this so-called new authority in Kiev, but Russia, with sound legal reasoning, has denounced the sacking of the elected Yanukovych and his government as a coup d’état.
The turmoil in Ukraine has therefore all the hallmarks of a Washington-led regime-change operation. Needless to say that is a wholly criminal interference that makes a mockery of international law. The ultimate target of this meddling, as has been brazenly stated over many years since the early 1990s by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other US imperial planners, is the destabilization of Russia itself.
Risibly, Washington’s new puppet president in Kiev, Oleksandr Turchynov, has now accused Russian forces of “seizing and capturing” the regional parliament and other government buildings in Ukraine’s southern Crimea. This complaint comes from political agitators who used violence and other crimes, including the murder of policemen, to seize government buildings in Kiev, culminating in the ousting of an elected president.
In all this, Russian President Vladimir Putin has maintained a cagey silence. But the Russian leader knows only too well the depth of American deception and hypocrisy, and Washington’s covert agenda for regime change – an agenda which is being ruthlessly pursued against Russia’s Arab ally, Syria.
For now, Moscow seems to be effecting an air of calm legality and playing by the rules, citing that its troops in Crimea are part of its bilateral military agreement with the Ukraine.
But, off the record, the Americans know that what Putin is really saying is this: “You want to break the law, well, OK, we can break it too. Now back off!”
Rules of sovereignty and international law are out the window, and it is Washington and its European puppets who threw all norms out that window with their incessant, illegal interference in Ukraine. Ukrainian territory, and its centuries of shared history, is a vital interest for Russia.
Putin is entirely right to lay down an unspoken military marker to Washington over Ukraine, just like he did when the Americans tried to mess militarily with South Ossetia in 2008 through its NATO proxy, Georgia.
American exceptionalism of arrogance and lawlessness does not understand the language of diplomacy. The only language it responds to is blunt force talking back to force.
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Posted: 02 Mar 2014 05:29 AM PST

A heretofore inexplicable fatal, chronic kidney disease that has affected poor farming regions around the globe may be linked to the use of biochemical giant Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide in areas with hard water, a new study has found.
The new study was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Researchers suggest that Roundup, or glyphosate, becomes highly toxic to the kidney once mixed with “hard” water or metals like arsenic and cadmium that often exist naturally in the soil or are added via fertilizer. Hard water contains metals like calcium, magnesium, strontium, and iron, among others. On its own, glyphosate is toxic, but not detrimental enough to eradicate kidney tissue.
The glyphosate molecule was patented as a herbicide by Monsanto in the early 1970s. The company soon brought glyphosate to market under the name “Roundup,” which is now the most commonly used herbicide in the world.
The hypothesis helps explain a global rash of the mysterious, fatal Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown etiology (CKDu) that has been found in rice paddy regions of northern Sri Lanka, for example, or in El Salvador, where CKDu is the second leading cause of death among males.
Furthermore, the study’s findings explain many observations associated with the disease, including the linkage between the consumption of hard water and CKDu, as 96 percent of patients have been found to have consumed “hard or very hard water for at least five years, from wells that receive their supply from shallow regolith aquifers.”
The CKDu was discovered in rice paddy farms in northern Sri Lanka around 20 years ago. The condition has spread quickly since then and now affects 15 percent of working age people in the region, or a total of 400,000 patients, the study says. At least 20,000 have died from CKDu there.
In 2009, the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health introduced criteria for CKDu. Basically, the Ministry found that CKDu did not share common risk factors as chronic kidney disease, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and glomerular nephritis, or inflammation of the kidney.
Based on geographical and socioeconomical factors associated with CKDu, it was assumed that environmental and occupational variables would offer clues to the disease’s origins – or in this case, it came from chemicals.
The new study noted that even the World Health Organization had found that CKDu is caused by exposure to arsenic, cadmium, and pesticides, in addition to hard water consumption, low water intake, and exposure to high temperatures. Yet why that certain area of Sri Lanka and why the disease didn’t show prior to the mid-1990s was left unanswered.
Researchers point out that political changes in Sri Lanka in the late 1970s led to the introduction of agrochemicals, especially in rice farming. They believe that 12 to 15 years of exposure to “low concentration kidney-damaging compounds” along with their accumulation in the body led to the appearance of CKDu in the mid-90s.
The incriminating agent, or Compound “X,” must have certain characteristics, researchers deduced. The compound, they hypothesized, must be: made of chemicals newly introduced in the last 20 to 30 years; capable of forming stable complexes with hard water; capable of retaining nephrotoxic metals and delivering them to the kidney; capable of multiple routes of exposure, such as ingestion, through skin or respiratory absorption, among other criteria.
These factors pointed to glyphosate, used in abundance in Sri Lanka. In the study, researchers noted that earlier studies had shown that typical glyphosate half-life of around 47 days in soil can increase up to 22 years after forming hard to biodegrade “strong complexes with metal ions.”
Scientists have derived three ways of exposure to glyphosate-metal complexes (GMCs): consumption of contaminated hard water, food, or the complex could be formed directly within circulation with glyphosate coming from dermal/respiratory route and metals from water and foods.
Rice farmers, for example, are at high risk of exposure to GMCs through skin absorption, inhalation, or tainted drinking water. GMCs seem to evade the normal liver’s detoxification process, thus damaging kidneys, the study found.
The study also suggests that glyphosate could be linked to similar epidemics of kidney disease of unknown origin in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and India.
Recent investigations by the Center for Public Integrity found that, in the last five years, CKDu is responsible for more deaths in El Salvador and Nicaragua than diabetes, AIDS, and leukemia combined.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 12:29