Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday 2 May 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 01 May 2014 04:29 AM PDT

The International Monetary Fund has approved a two-year $17.1 billion loan package for Ukraine. The immediate disbursement of $3.2 billion will allow Ukraine to avoid a potential debt default.
The IMF’s 24-member board agreed to the two-year program to aid Ukraine’s troubled economy on Wednesday.
The approval gives the green light for the immediate release of $3.2 billion to Ukraine, which will allow the nation not to fall into default, Reuters reports. More than half of that money will be dedicated to supporting the country’s budget.
The package will open up loans from other donors totaling around $15 billion. The goal is for Ukraine to use the money to stabilize its economy.
“The authorities’ economic program supported by the Fund aims to restore macroeconomic stability, strengthen economic governance and transparency, and launch sound and sustainable economic growth, while protecting the most vulnerable,” the IMF said in a statement.
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde commented on the aid package, stating that the plan may come with geopolitical and implementation risks.
“On the implementation front, we are taking all the precautions we can in order to mitigate those risks,” Lagarde told reporters on Wednesday. “On the geopolitical front, clearly the bilateral international support, and the cooperation of all parties, will be extremely helpful to reinforce the position of the economy of Ukraine.”
“We believe that Ukraine has an opportunity to seize the moment, to break away from previous practices, both from the fiscal, from the monetary, and from the governance point of view,” Lagarde added.
Ukraine’s crisis was exacerbated after months of anti-government protests and Crimea’s referendum to join Russia.
The country’s economy is forecasted to contract by three percent due to the chaos and lack of order, according to Ukrainian authorities. The nation’s output dropped 1.1 percent in the first quarter of 2014.
The ongoing protests, especially in the east of the country, are not helping the nation get its economy back on track. In fact, Ukraine’s acting President Aleksandr Turchinov said on Wednesday that Kiev’s government cannot control the situation in the east of the country, and called to speed up the creation of regional militias loyal to Kiev.
Lagarde noted that further sanctions against Russia may harm Ukraine’s economy even further, as its neighboring country is a key export market for Ukraine.
“Clearly on the front of sanctions, anything that undermines the economic situation of the country will jeopardize the implementation of the program, which is why we very strongly encourage the parties to negotiate, to come to terms,” Lagarde said.
‘Bold program of reforms’
Lagarde argued that Ukraine has already shown its ability to undertake “comprehensive reforms,” listing a few of the sacrifices that have been made.
“Whether it was a question of letting the exchange rate float, whether it was a question of reforming the procurement law, whether it was a question of modifying the price of gas to customers or to corporate. They’ve (Ukrainian government) done all these things to demonstrate their determination to endorse a very bold program of reforms,” Lagarde stated.
The IMF money comes with stringent terms, asking for various cuts and economic reforms. In the case of Ukraine, the requirements include a 50 percent increase in the price of gas for households, as well as a quick pension reform (more cuts) and lower government spending.
The World Bank warned on April 10 that the loan terms set by the IMF would cut 2014 consumption in Ukraine by 8 percent, as well as erode capital investment.
The increased cost of household gas and district heating “will affect purchasing power and limit the government’s ability to boost capital spending this year. Thus, in 2014, we expect to see a decline in both consumption and fixed investment,” the World Bank said in a statement.
Earlier in April, Ukraine’s finance minister, Oleksandr Shlapak, said that paying off debt to Russia would not be a top priority for Ukraine when it secured its first tranche of International Monetary (IMF) bailout cash.
Ukraine’s total debt to Russia, including the $2.2 billion bill for gas, now stands at $16.6 billion, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said.
Back in December, before the Ukrainian protests turned into a nationwide crisis, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin announced that the Russian government would essentially buy $15 billion in Ukrainian debt by investing in Ukrainian bonds, using money from Russia’s National Welfare Fund. The announcement came after a meeting with then-President Viktor Yanukovich in Moscow.
The deal included a 33% discount for natural gas, which could have save the country $7 billion in 2014. The agreement was hailed by then-Prime Minister Azarov as saving Ukraine from economic ruin.
Protests in Kiev began in November when Ukraine backed out of a trade negotiation deal with the EU in favor of a debt deal with Russia – a move interpreted by Ukrainians as a decisive step away from integration with the EU.
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Posted: 01 May 2014 04:19 AM PDT
Several vehicles fell about 40 feet after a portion of the Scenic Highway collapsed on April 30 in Pensacola, Florida.
The worst floods in decades in the US states of Florida and Alabama have left at least one person dead and brought destruction across the South.
The victim is an elderly woman who drowned Tuesday after high waters submerged her car on a highway, the Florida Highway Patrol said.
The heavy rain also caused partial collapse of the Scenic Highway, causing two vehicles to plummet 40 feet.
Bill Pearson, Escambia County, Florida public information officer, said emergency management received several reports of people being swept from their cars and those cases remain “unresolved.”
“It’s gotten to the point where we can’t send EMS and fire rescue crews out on some 911 calls because they can’t get there,” Pearson said. “We’ve had people whose homes are flooding and they’ve had to climb up to the attic.”
Wednesday was the single rainiest day ever recorded in Pensacola, Florida.
In southern Alabama, rising flood waters sent many scrambling to find shelter. The widespread flooding is the latest fallout from a violent storm system that began in Arkansas and Oklahoma and worked its way south, killing 37 people along the way.
Most of the eastern third of the US will continue to see heavy rain and the chance of severe thunderstorms and flooding until Thursday.
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Posted: 01 May 2014 03:38 AM PDT

The Russian Ministry of Defense has ordered brigades of military medical teams to be urgently dispatched to the Ukrainian border, another sign that Moscow is preparing for war after tens of thousands of troops were sent to the border region for drills.
According to a translated report by St. Petersburg’s Rustlegraph news agency:
By order of the Ministry of Defense in the Military Medical Academy in Kirov on the morning of April 25 were quickly formed military medical brigades. In team included military doctors of the number of officers and senior cadets WMA.
They announced that there is work in the Ukraine.
As confirmed by the “Telegraph” workers of the Academy, on the eve of April 24, at about 22:00 of the Ministry of Defense was ordered urgent formation of medical teams to send them to Ukraine.
As Mac Slavo notes, the dispatch of the medical workers suggests that the earlier movement of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers to the same region was not merely intended as a show of force.
Despite Moscow’s claim that tens of thousands of troops dispatched to the border for exercises had returned to their permanent positions, NATO said there was no sign of a withdrawal.
“We currently have no information that indicates a withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukrainian border. We continue to urge Russia to abide by the Geneva agreement and to pull back all its troops along the Ukrainian border in favor of diplomacy and dialogue,” a NATO official told Reuters.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s acting President Aleksandr Turchinov said earlier today that Kiev cannot control the east of the country and that Russia is threatening to “unleash a continental war against Ukraine”.
Vladimir Putin recently visited his “spiritual home,” the Valaam monastery, at which some speculate the Russian President is mulling over a major decision regarding the crisis in Ukraine.
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Posted: 01 May 2014 03:17 AM PDT

Russia says it reserves the right to take appropriate action if the West continues its anti-Moscow moves with regard to the crisis in Ukraine.
Speaking at a news conference in the Chilean capital Santiago on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “We want to give our fellow governments the opportunity to calm down.”
Lavrov, however, noted that if the West continues its actions, then Russia would study the situation.
He added that Washington is not willing to find a solution for the Ukrainian crisis, saying, “The United States is not interested in the Ukraine crisis so much as they want to show things should work the way they say.”
The US and its allies have recently imposed new sanctions on Russia over the crisis in Ukraine.
Tensions between the Western powers and Moscow over Ukraine heightened after Crimea declared independence from Kiev and formally applied to become part of the Russian Federation following a referendum on March 16, in which about 97 percent of Crimeans voted for reunion with Russia.
The move led to pro-Russian protests in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. Kiev accuses Moscow of supporting the protesters, a claim which Moscow denies.
Moscow called on the US to force Kiev to halt its operation in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions. But the interim authorities in Kiev said they are ready to fight Russia.
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Posted: 01 May 2014 02:36 AM PDT

While the state of Oregon gears up to test its shores for radioactive contamination from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, university scientists have found that radiation levels in some albacore tuna caught off its coast have tripled.
According to researchers at the University of Oregon, the results came after tests analyzed the cesium levels in 26 tuna caught prior to the 2011 nuclear calamity – as far back as 2008 – and those caught after the accident.
Although the levels of radioactive isotopes in some of the tuna tripled after the disaster, the researchers found they are still “a thousand times lower” than the safety standards outlined by the US Department of Agriculture.
“A year of eating albacore with these cesium traces is about the same dose of radiation as you get from spending 23 seconds in a stuffy basement from radon gas,” the study’s lead author, Delvan Neville said to Oregon’s Statesman Journal.
Still, Neville added that the discovery of any amount of radiation is significant.
“You can’t say there is absolutely zero risk because any radiation is assumed to carry at least some small risk,” he said. “But these trace levels are too small to be a realistic concern.”
Researchers stated that the migration paths of the tuna could also affect the levels of radiation going forward. Most of the 3-year-old tuna tested had no traces of Fukushima radiation, but 4-year-old tuna – which likely traveled through the radioactive plume a couple of times – had higher cesium levels. Continued migration could increase cesium levels further, but the researchers said it would still fall well below maximum safety levels.
Since the results did reveal a spike in radiation, though, the researchers will be expanding their study beyond Oregon to test a larger number of tuna across the West Coast.
“The presence of these radioactive isotopes is actually helping us in an odd way – giving us information that will allow us to estimate how albacore tuna migrate between our West Coast and Japan,” Neville told the Journal.
Meanwhile, Oregon state itself plans to hold its next quarterly radiation test on May 13. Back in February, Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution stated that a plume of radioactive water from Fukushima would likely hit the US West Coast by April 2014. Buesseler said the plume is likely too diluted to pose a health concern to Americans or the habitat, but added that only testing will be able to confirm his belief.
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Posted: 30 Apr 2014 03:19 PM PDT

A solar eclipse that occurs on average only once every 73 years may be perfectly witnessed only by penguins in Antarctica, while watchers in Australia had a shot at seeing the sun as a “super-fat banana”.
The crescent sun, an annular eclipse meaning that the moon is too far away to completely block out the sun, instead creating a perfect ‘ring of fire’ could be witnessed in Perth, Australia, from 05:00 GMT on April 29. Such eclipses are relatively common, with about four every five years. The last occurred in May 2013.
What makes this eclipse – the first of 2014 – unusual is that it is non-central, meaning that the center of the Moon’s shadow will not fall on Earth, instead passing above the Southern Hemisphere sky.
Of 3,956 annular eclipses calculated to have happened or scheduled to happen between 2,000 BC and 3,000 AD only 68, or 1.7 percent, are non-central annular eclipses. This is only the third such event since the 17th century.
As most of the shadow was set to miss Earth – the perfect spot to watch the eclipse at its most symmetrical would have been above the planet . The only place where the “ring of fire”, or annulus, can be seen at all is in Antarctica. The spot is half way between the Dumont d’Urville and Concordia stations – located 1,100 km apart – meaning that in all likelihood no human was able to witness the unusual phenomenon.
“This is a thoroughly bizarre eclipse,” said a statement from Bob Berman, an astronomer with the Slooh Space Camera, which broadcasts astral events online.
“As we will watch in real time as the inky black hemisphere of the moon partially obscures the sun, the greatest thrill might be an awareness of what’s occurring — unseen by any human — in a tiny region of Antarctica.”
For sentient observers, due to the imperfect angle of observation the phenomenon wouldn’t “look any different from a normal, partial eclipse,” Stephen Hughes told Australian Associated Press. A partial eclipse occurs when the Sun and the Moon do not fully align, so that the latter blocks out only a chunk of the former.
About half the Sun was covered when the eclipse passed Sydney, and more than two thirds over Melbourne.
“Melbourne will be quite a bit better than Sydney … a super-fat banana,”Hughes said before the event.
The eclipse could also be perceived in southern Indonesian islands.
NASA published an interactive map that allowed Australians to see when the eclipse passed through their area, but as usual, amateur sky-watchers were instructed to avoid looking at the Sun without protective equipment.
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Posted: 30 Apr 2014 03:06 PM PDT

A new study has found that China is rapidly moving ahead to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy as soon as this year.
The new finding by the International Comparison Program (ICP), which involves the World Bank and United Nations, said on Wednesday that China in 2011 closely followed the US that has been dominating the world economy for over a century.
“The size of the Chinese economy in 2011 was 87 percent of the US economy, up from 43 percent in 2005,” the ICP said.
It added the US accounted for over 17 percent of the global economy in 2011, while China stood next with nearly 15 percent.
The study, using Purchasing Power Parities (PPP), said this year could mark an overtaking point for China, as it has been catching up with the US for years.
“There’s a symbolic element to this, to China overtaking the US, and that seems to be happening,” said Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The latest data “plays to the idea that China is very big and getting bigger. It’s not to be underestimated.”
The study also added that India overtook Japan to become the world’s third- largest economy with 6.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
“India was now the world’s third-largest economy, moving ahead of Japan,” it noted.
The study added, “The results indicate that only a small number of economies have the greatest shares of world GDP. However, the shares of large economies such as China and India have more than doubled relative to that of the United States.”
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Posted: 30 Apr 2014 02:55 PM PDT


Chilling: Political leader charged with hate crime for quoting Winston Churchill.
Political party leader Paul Weston was arrested by police and faces up to two years in jail for criticizing the religion of Islam during a public speech in the United Kingdom.
Weston’s “racially aggravated” hate crime consisted of him quoting Winston Churchill.
Weston’s arrest reveals the chilling implementation of thought crime in Britain and how political correctness is being used as a weapon with which to destroy the edifice of freedom of speech across the western world.
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Posted: 30 Apr 2014 02:51 PM PDT
According to a new WHO report, in some countries the antibiotic treatment has proven useless on more than half of the patients.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that antibiotics are losing their power to fight infections, which may lead to extensive drug resistance in the near future.
“The problem is so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine,” the WHO said in a report published on Wednesday.
According to the report, if the current trend continues, minor infections that are treatable now could become incurable and cause death.
“Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” WHO Assistant Director General for Health Security Keiji Fukuda said.
“Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating,” Fukuda added.
In some countries the antibiotic treatment has proven useless on more than half of the patients, the report noted.
Health experts have long warned against the dangers of drug resistance particularly in diseases such as tuberculosis and the flu.
The WHO said doctors should only prescribe antibiotics when they are necessary and patients should only use them when recommend by a doctor. Patients should also complete the full cycle of prescription.
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Posted: 30 Apr 2014 02:26 PM PDT

New round of Western sanction against Russia will target seven individuals and 17 companies. They are meant to affect Moscow’s stance over the ongoing Ukrainian crisis.
The individuals listed by the US Department of Treasury on Monday include Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, chair of the parliamentary commission on Foreign Affairs, Aleksey Pushkov, chief of presidential office, Vyacheslav Volodin, and Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft oil company.
The list of sanctioned companies, which Washington believes to be “linked to Putin’s inner circle,” includes several banks, construction and transport companies.
The Volga Group, an investment vehicle that manages assets on behalf of the businessman, Gennady Timchenko, and SMP Bank, whose main shareholders were affected by the previous set of US sanctions, are among those to face restrictive measures.
Oil and gas engineering company, Stroytransgaz, and one of Russia’s biggest rail transporters of oil, Transoil, are also among the companies affected by the sanctions.
The US Department of Commerce has introduced additional restrictions on 13 of those companies by imposing a license requirement with a presumption of denial for the export, re-export or other foreign transfer of US-originating items to the companies.
Later in the day, Washington announced a tightened policy to deny export license applications for any high-technology items that could contribute to Russia’s military capabilities.
But the US may move even further and impose sanctions against specific branches of the Russian economy if Moscow begins a military operation in Ukraine, Jay Carney, White House spokesman, said.
The announcement of a new round of US sanctions against Russia is “revolting” as they go against the way civilized states should communicate, Sergey Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said.
“We will respond, although it is not our choice,” Ryabkov is cited as saying by Itar-Tass news agency. “But we can’t leave this situation without reaction, without practical reaction, without reaction by means of our own decisions. US behavior in the field is becoming provocative.”
According to the deputy FM, the American decision stems from a “distorted and groundless” assumption on the state of affairs in Ukraine.
Obama said the US and its allies would keep broader sanctions “in reserve” in the event of further escalation on the ground in Ukraine. He admitted that he was uncertain whether the latest round of measures would be effective.
“The goal is not to go after Mr. Putin personally; the goal is to change his calculus, to encourage him to walk the walk, not just talk the talk” on diplomacy to resolve the crisis, Obama said in Manila during a trip to Asia.
As the US pushes for more sanctions against Russia, EU members have preliminary agreed to also impose asset freezes and visa bans on 15 more people. The names of those to be added to the list will not be made public until they are published in the EU’s Official Journal on Tuesday, Reuters reported citing an unnamed diplomat source. However, Many Europeans opposed anti-Russian sanctions, which would target the economy as opposed to individuals close to the Russian leadership, since economic sanctions would hurt European economies as well as that of Russia. The US, being economically tied with Russia to a much lesser degree than Europe, says it would not impose economic sanctions unilaterally.
“I would be very surprised if all European countries found a common position on economic sanctions,” Thierry Mariani, a member of the French National Assembly, told RT. “When one country says ‘we don’t speak about finance’… and some other country says ‘we don’t speak about energy,’ then we don’t speak about anything. That’s why we arrive unfortunately [at] personal sanctions, which are completely nonsense.”
Canada has also imposed sanctions on two Russian banks and nine individuals, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement announcing the measures on Monday. Harper’s office did not immediately provide names.
The Russian leadership has thus far brushed off the threat of sanctions as ineffectual, arguing they might in fact buoy the Russian economy in the long term.
“Overreliance can lead to a loss of sovereignty,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a media forum in St Petersburg on Thursday.
Western-led sanctions have several advantages for Russia, Putin said.
Putin said the threat of real economic sanctions is already bolstering domestic businesses, bringing more offshore funds back to Russia, and giving policymakers the push they need to establish a domestic payment system.
His comments echo sentiments made by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last week, who similarly argued that further sanctions would only make Russia stronger.
“Thanks to Western sanctions, Russia has been given the incentive to reduce its dependence on outside and instead regional economies are being more self-sufficient,” Medvedev said April 22.
Medvedev said any restrictions on Russian goods to the EU or US would serve to redirect Russian exports to Asian markets, which are more robust.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 21:02