Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday, 21 July 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 20 Jul 2014 03:09 PM PDT

Scores of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers have been killed on Sunday as hostilities continue in the Gaza strip. Both sides earlier agreed to a brief ceasefire to allow medics to reach those wounded by Israeli shells.
At least 87 Palestinians were killed on Sunday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, as the Israeli Defense Forces shelled the Shejaia district in the north east of Gaza. The casualties are the heaviest since Israel launched its offensive on the Palestinian territory on July 8.
Harry Fear, an RT contributor who is in Gaza summed up the scene this afternoon. “For approximately one hour this afternoon, Israel held fire on the Shejaia neighborhood in east Gaza. Just over the last few minutes, Israel has continued to fire on this neighborhood, which has been heavily pounded this morning and last night,” he said.
Both Hamas and Israel agreeded to a brief ceasefire earlier in the day, which was broken after just an hour after shots were fired in Gaza.
“The agreement to implement a ceasefire was ended because of Hamas who started shooting at our soldiers. We had to answer back,” said an Israeli army source.
Hamas is yet to comment on Israeli allegations that it had breached the ceasefire.
The death toll was condemned by the Arab League who described Israeli attacks on Gaza on Sunday as a “war crime” against Palestinian civilians.
Over 400 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s operation Protective Edge, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said on Sunday. 13 Israeli soldiers were killed on Saturday night and early Sunday in several incidents across the Gaza strip, bringing the total number of fatilites in less than two days, according to Haaretz.
During the ceasefire, local Gaza rescue services managed to evacuate 50 Palestinian bodies from the Shejaia neighborhood in the east of Gaza City. The Gaza Health Ministry says the dead included 17 children and 14 women and hundreds of wounded were being treated. The Rafah crossing has been opened, but only for use for humanitarian emergencies.
The ceasefire, requested by the International Committee of the Red Cross, was due to last from 1:30pm to 3:30pm (10:30-12:30 GMT) in the Shejaia district.
According to Haaretz, the Israeli Defense Forces also announced they will set up a field hospital near the Erez Crossing at the northern end of the Gaza strip, to treat wounded Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel will take “whatever action is necessary” to halt Hamas cross-border rocket attacks from Gaza and restore calm but insisted his forces were doing their utmost to avoid civilian casualties there.
“We try to target military targets and unfortunately there are civilian casualties which we regret and we don’t seek,” Netanyahu told CNN shortly after an Israeli attack on a Gaza neighborhood killed at least 89 Palestinians.
He accused Hamas of deliberately targeting Israeli civilians and of using Gaza residents as “human shields.” Asked how long it would take Israel to complete an operation it says is intended to destroy Hamas weapons tunnels, Netanyahu said it was being done “fairly quickly,” but gave no time frame.
Qatar ready to host truce talks
Doha has announced it will host a meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday, which will look to try and push for an end to fighting in the Gaza strip, according to a senior source from the country.
The session is due to take place in Doha and will be chaired by the Gulf state’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who has been acting as a “channel of communication” between the Islamist Hamas group and the international community, said the source.
“Qatar has presented Hamas’ demands to the international community. The list has been presented to France and to the UN. The talks tomorrow will be to further negotiate these conditions.”
Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has rejected Egyptian efforts to end the fighting, saying any deal must include an end to a blockade of the coastal area and a recommitment to a ceasefire reached in an eight-day war there in 2012.
The conditions include the release of prisoners re-arrested since a 2011 exchange deal with Israel, the opening of Gaza-Israel border crossings and an end to an Israeli blockade on the Gaza seaport, a Hamas source in Doha said.
“In general, Israel must end all forms of aggression and attacks, end the blockade of Gaza and remove the actions that resulted from its military offensive in the West Bank after June 12,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters in the Palestinian Territories.
Egypt said on Saturday it had no plans to revise its ceasefire proposal, which Hamas has already rejected. And the Hamas source in Doha said the group has no plans to change its conditions for a ceasefire.
“We want the rights of our people. Palestinians on the ground are supporting us and we will get them back their rights,” said the source.
An IDF spokesman insisted to RT that Israel does not target civilians.
“We do not target in any way or form civilians, we target Hamas terrorists. The idea of the operation is ongoing in order to secure safety and security for the state of Israel. Hamas decided to have an onslaught against the state of Israel and indeed even when we held our stations yesterday for six hours they continued to bombard Israel indiscriminately and we were left basically with no alternative,” he said.
Source
        
Posted: 20 Jul 2014 02:54 PM PDT

The UK will tighten sanctions against Russia if Moscow does not help in investigating a Malaysian airliner crash in Ukraine, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said.
On July 17, Malaysian Airline flight MH17, which was travelling to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, crashed, killing all 298 people on board. There is speculation that the Boeing 777 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying 33,000 feet over Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
Emergency workers say they have found 196 bodies at the crash site. Ten Britons were among those killed in the incident.
In an interview with the state-run BBC on Sunday, Hammond said Britain would seek to persuade the European Union “to go further in terms of sanctions” unless Moscow’s position on the Malaysian Airlines crash changes.
The British secretary also urged Moscow to put pressure on pro-Russia forces in east Ukraine to allow more access to the crash site, adding that Russia had allegedly done nothing to facilitate the investigation.
“What we need is full Russian cooperation… they [Russian authorities] must use their influence to allow international access to the site to secure the evidence and secure respect for the bodies and the possessions of the victims,” Hammond said.
His comments echoed British Prime Minister David Cameron who said Moscow should be held accountable if it is confirmed that the Malaysian flight MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from a position controlled by pro-Russians in east Ukraine.
Ukraine and its Western allies have laid the blame on pro-Russians in the east of the country, who have denied any involvement. Kiev also pointed the blaming finger at Moscow for helping pro-Russia forces destroy evidence at the crash site.
The EU and the US have imposed several rounds of sanctions on Russia over the crisis in Ukraine in recent months.
Moscow, however, has stressed that the sanctions will not change its stance on Ukraine.
Source
        
Posted: 20 Jul 2014 02:49 PM PDT

As the world heard about the downing of MH17 in Ukraine on July 17, Bloomberg Businesswek reported hackers with an “intelligence agency of another country” had placed malware on the American stock exchange NASDAQ.
“Elite Russian hackers had breached the stock exchange and inserted a digital bomb,” the NSA had concluded after an investigation, writes Michael Riley.
“The best case was that the hackers had packed their malware with a destruction module in case they were detected and needed to create havoc in Nasdaq computer banks to throw off their pursuers. The worst case was that creating havoc was their intention. President Obama was briefed on the findings.”
According to U.S. investigators the Russians were not attempting to destroy the NASDAQ but rather clone it, “either to incorporate its technology directly into their exchange or as a model to learn from” and had “dispatched an elite team of cyberspies to get it.”
Cyber espionage is nothing new. The NSA specializes in it. In response to NSA spying and cyber mischief Germany is now considering using typerwriters to foil espionage attempts. Earlier this Germany decided to expel the CIA station chief in Berlin in response to espionage.
Despite the fact states spying on and stealing from each other is routine – Israel for instance routinely steals U.S. secrets under the cover of trade missions and joint defense technology contracts – the Bloomberg story singles out Russia at precisely the moment it is accused of engaging in a terrorist shoot down of a civilian passenger airliner.
Source
        
Posted: 20 Jul 2014 02:24 PM PDT

That Western media frequently and blatantly distort events and disquote officials with a view to manipulating public minds is no news; however, one “news agency”, the UK-based Reuters, has in recent times been repeatedly and unabashedly breaking new grounds in this regard.
Just recently, Reuters sought to portray as mere allegation a United Nations report on a range of violations committed by the Takfiri ISIL terrorists against civilians in Iraq.
A UN report, compiled by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and the UN human rights office (OHCHR), said on July 18 that ISIL terrorists and its allies are carrying out “large-scale killings, injuries and destruction and damage of livelihoods and property.”
“ISIL and associated armed groups have carried out many of these attacks in a systematic manner heedless of the impact on civilians, or have systematically targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure with the intention of killing and wounding as many civilians as possible,” the report stated.
The report also said that children have been disproportionately affected by the conflict.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said, “The deliberate or indiscriminate targeting of civilians, the killing of civilians, the use of civilians as shields, the hindering of access for civilians to humanitarian assistance may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.”
However, in covering the UN report, Reuters threw away any semblance of impartiality on the ISIL terrorists’ crimes.
In its news article, Reuters claimed that the United Nations has “accused” the ISIL of war crimes and wrote: “U.N. accuses Islamic State of executions, rape, child abuse in Iraq” while the report by the UN vehemently slams the barbarities of the ISIL terrorists, stating that their criminality amounts up to war crimes.
Meanwhile, Reuters used the word “fighters” for these terrorists.
Further to that, the news agency had previously breached the principle of impartiality on Iran by publishing biased and manipulated articles on young Iranian women training in the Japanese martial arts, Ninjutsu.
On February 18, 2012, Reuters showed a number of Iranian girls practicing martial arts in a city near Tehran, claiming Iran was training more than 3,000 female ninjas to kill any possible foreign invaders.
The report claimed that the athletes are undercover assassins in the service of the Islamic Republic.
In September, 2012, a court in Tehran found London-based Reuters news agency guilty over the report.
Source
        
Posted: 20 Jul 2014 02:17 PM PDT

Items presumed to be the data recorders from the crashed Malaysian plane have been found and delivered to Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, according to the leader of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk.
“Aircraft parts looking like black boxes were found at the site of the plane crash. They are currently in Donetsk, in the People’s Republic’s (DPR) government headquarters, under my personal control,” Aleksandr Boroday, the republic’s prime minister, told reporters.
The self-defense forces are ready to hand the data recorders over to international monitors “in case they arrive,” he said.
Boroday said that the found items “cannot be given” to Kiev representatives since in that case they could possibly damage them to “falsify the results [of the recordings].”
Another official for the DPR, Sergey Kavtaradze, said that what he thought were the flight recorders looked undamaged on the outside. He added that since there are no aviation experts in the DPR, they cannot be absolutely sure that the found items are the black boxes. The items will be passed to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) which will lead the investigation into the crash of flight MH17.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Groysman said that Kiev had suspected that the boxes were in rebels’ hands for several days, Reuters cited.
A group of international experts has yet to arrive at the site of the tragedy. They are expected to be in the region on Sunday evening, according to DPR’s Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Purgin.
“A huge crowd of experts are sitting in Kiev for some reason and. They will probably come here only on Sunday,” Purgin told Russian News Service on Saturday.
Earlier, the DPR said it would guarantee the safety of specialists investigating the plane crash in the area if Kiev agrees to a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, observed Sunday a train with bodies of the plane MH17 crash victims which are to be sent to Donetsk.
Refrigerated train cars were kept on a railway station in the town of Torez, not far from the crash site.
So far, 223 bodies of passengers killed in the Boeing 777 crash on July 17 have been recovered. The Malaysia Airlines plane was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 298 people on board, including 15 crew members. The search operation in the conflict-torn east Ukrainian region is continuing.
Source
        
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 09:29