Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday, 15 August 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 14 Aug 2014 03:43 PM PDT

The number of killed and wounded in eastern Ukraine has doubled to 2,086 over the last two weeks, according to the UN’s “very conservative estimates”.
“This corresponds to a clear escalating trend,” UN human rights spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly told Reuters in response to a query.
Over 60 people have been killed or wounded every day, Pouilly added.
Almost 5,000 have been wounded.
The figures comprise Ukrainian military, self-defense forces, and civilians. However, those are “very conservative estimates,” Pouilly said.
The Ukraine crisis has been widely described as a humanitarian catastrophe. According to the UN’s latest estimates, over 110,000 people have been internally displaced in the conflict. Moscow has reported that 730,000 people have fled across the border into Russia.
In Donetsk alone, more than 1,000 people have been left homeless due to the fighting, according to the city administration. In Lugansk, another regional center, 250,000 people can’t leave the city and have been without water, electricity, and communications for over a week.
The Russian humanitarian aid is set to arrive to the Russian-Ukrainian border by the end of Wednesday. However, the Ukrainian authorities repeatedly stated that they won’t allow the aid to pass despite the Red Cross and the OSCE observers watching over the mission.
Source
        
Posted: 14 Aug 2014 03:38 PM PDT

Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised to do everything to stop the ongoing violence in eastern parts of neighboring Ukraine.
Speaking in Crimea on Thursday, the Russian president described the violence in eastern Ukraine as fratricide.
“The country has sunk into bloody chaos in a fratricidal conflict,” Putin said, adding, “We will do our best to end this conflict as soon as possible so that the bloodletting in Ukraine ends.”
The Russian president also lashed out at Western governments for pressuring Russia over Ukraine. Putin said Moscow will withdraw its participation in such organizations as the European Court of Human Rights, should the West threaten Russia’s national interests.
President Putin also said he has signed off on establishing a Russian military task force in Crimea.
Earlier this year, Crimea rejoined Russia decades after Moscow gave the peninsula to Ukraine during the Soviet era.
On March 16, Crimea’s largely Russian-speaking residents voted in a referendum to break away from Ukraine and join Russia.
The Ukrainian government, the United States and the European Union rejected the referendum and condemned Crimea’s move.
On March 21, President Putin signed into law documents that officially made the Black Sea peninsula part of the Russian territory. Putin said the move was carried out based on international law.
Russia said last month it would invest more than USD 20 billion in Crimea up to 2020 mainly for building a bridge across a four-kilometer strait separating Crimea from Russia.
Source
        
Posted: 14 Aug 2014 03:28 PM PDT


Clear connection between SSRI drugs and suicide ignored once again by establishment media.
A video in which Robin Williams appears to admit to being on Prozac suggests a potential link between SSRI drugs, which are known to increase the risk of suicide, and the tragedy of the actor’s death.
During an interview with Entertainment Tonight filmed in April last year, Williams refers to a conversation he had with television producer David Kelly.
“He’s so mellow…talking to him is like taking a Prozac because you feel, you just feel good,” said Williams.
While it’s not known for sure whether or not the actor was on anti-depressants before his suicide, Williams’ long standing battle with depression would seem to indicate he had at some point taken SSRI drugs.
Once again, despite the mainstream media’s obsession with getting to the root cause of why Williams decided to take his own life, the question of whether anti-depressants, which are known to increase suicidal tendencies in some people, played a role in his death has been almost completely overlooked.
As the website SSRI Stories profusely documents, there are literally hundreds of examples of mass shootings, suicides, murders and other violent episodes that have been committed by individuals on psychiatric drugs over the past three decades. The number of cases is staggering.
Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former full-time consultant at the National Institute of Mental Health Dr. Peter R. Breggin has testified in approximately 100 trials since 1976 about the clear connection between psychiatric drugs and outbursts of violence. Breggin asserts that there is a definite “causal relationship between antidepressant drugs and the production of suicide, violence, mania and other behavioral abnormalities.”
In 2005, Harvard psychiatrist Martin Teicher blew the whistle on how Prozac manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co. lied to the public for 15 years in denying the connection between Prozac and suicide. According to Teicher, Americans were treated like ”guinea pigs” as part of a mass psychiatric experiment.
According to the drug’s own insert, side-effects of Prozac include “suicidal behavior” and “suicidal thoughts.”
Why is the clear connection between SSRI drugs and violence, be it murder or suicide, almost always ignored by the establishment media in the aftermath of a highly publicized suicide or mass murder?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the pharmaceutical giants who produce drugs like Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil spend around $2.4 billion dollars a year on direct-to-consumer television advertising every year. By running negative stories about prescription drugs, individual networks risk losing tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue.
Watch the video below in which Alex Jones breaks down the connection between SSRI drugs, violence and Hollywood.

Source
        
Posted: 14 Aug 2014 03:27 PM PDT

Comedian Robin Williams was found early this morning of an apparent suicide. He was 63 years old. He struggled with addiction and depression for most of his life and recently checked into rehab as part of his constant battle.
But if the statistics are correct, he was one of 9.2 million people in the United States who suffer from what’s known as “dual diagnosis” of substance abuse and mental health problems.
Perhaps comedians are more at risk for suicide, I can’t say. If you haven’t seen it, the very heartfelt message from late night host Craig Ferguson on the subject of addiction above is very moving. Ferguson was 15 years sober when he gave this monologue.
No one can know how Robin Williams felt at the time he made his decision to take his own life. But I can tell you what I’ve heard from literally thousands of other alcoholics and drug addicts I’ve met in 14 years of sobriety who have been in a similar place, struggling with a disease they just can’t seem to beat.
The next time you see a homeless person with mental health or substance abuse issues on the street, stand there and watch them for a little while. More importantly, watch the people who walk past them. See how embarrassed they are that this person is there at all, and in such a degraded condition. See the contempt they have that they’re being asked for something, or their anger at even being bothered. Or watch them stop out of pity and give the homeless person their spare change, hoping it will just make the whole thing go away.
The way that homeless person looks on the outside is no doubt very different from how Robin Williams looked on the outside, but on the inside anyone struggling with mental illness and addiction usually feels the same way no matter their station in life.
There are 10 times as many mentally ill people in jails as there are in hospitals in the United States, and it doesn’t save taxpayers one bit of money. Roughly half the people in federal prison are there on drug related charges. That should tell you something about what kind of signals we’re sending to people with mental health and substance abuse issues. We don’t see addiction and mental illness as just that, illnesses. We see people who suffer from them as weak, as criminals, as people of low character and we treat them accordingly, as people we are deeply ashamed of and who need to be locked away for the greater good.
Depression and substance abuse are inexorably intertwined for reasons too lengthy to go into here, but it’s fair to say that what happened to Robin Williams is not an isolated incident. Many famous people who have struggled with depression and addiction will tell you the same story no matter what their outsides looked like, on the inside they felt like that homeless person. Completely trapped, utterly degraded and ashamed, unable to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” the way that society expects them to.
We can’t just help people in isolated pockets and think that individual treatment alone will solve the problem. If it would, rich people would be fine and Robin Williams would still be alive. Treatment certainly does help some but it won’t take away the shame and the stigma surrounding addiction and depression. We might as well start telling people with breast cancer or Parkinson’s disease to pull themselves together and get a job and everything will be fine and then locking them up when it isn’t.
Depression is estimated to have direct and indirect workplace costs to the economy of $34 billion per year. Which is probably a gross underestimate, because the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that the cost of drug abuse is $559 billion per year. And things are only getting worse. A 2012 study concluded that the number of people in the U.S. who experience depression at some point is increasing by 20% each year.
Any sane society would acknowledge that these are not just serious problems but in fact public health crises and make it a top priority to deal with them.
Robin Williams may have been rich and had access to all the treatment in the world, but nobody can escape feelings of shame, weakness and guilt that depressed and addicted people feel in a society that just wants them to “buck up” and “treats them” by putting them in jail if they don’t.
Stopping our horrific policy of trying to torture people into mental health and sobriety is only part of the problem, however. Beyond that there is a dramatic need to change the way we think about people with mental illness and substance abuse issues, how we identify them and get them help. The cost to our GDP is already far in excess of anything it would cost to do so, and the cost in human misery, not only to those who suffer but to those who love them and try to get them help is incalculable.
Source
        
Posted: 14 Aug 2014 02:45 PM PDT

​Canada has offered to donate its experimental Ebola virus vaccine to West African States after the WHO said it would be ethical to use untested vaccines to try and contain the outbreak that has already claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHA) the country sees the vaccine as a global resource and is in talks with the US and the World Health Organization to coordinate the best application of a limited number of doses in its possession.
The deputy head of PHA Dr. Gregory Taylor estimates that Canada has about 1,500 doses of the vaccine, which has not yet been tested on people, saying that 1,000 doses of vaccine could be sent abroad for use, Canadian Press reports.
Taylor also warned that since the drug is yet to be tested on humans, it’s not clear what dosage is needed to protect a person, so those numbers could change.
Earlier on Tuesday, the WHO announced that experimental drugs can be used to treat patients but the scarcity of supplies raises questions who gets saved first.
“There was unanimous agreement among the experts that in the special circumstances of this Ebola outbreak it is ethical to offer unregistered interventions as potential treatments or prevention,” the WHO’s assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny said after an ethics panel published its guidance.
The WHO adjourned a meeting after Zmapp an experimental drug previously tested on humans by US biotech company Mapp Biopharmaceutical, was offered as a treatment to two US aid workers infected in Liberia. The WHO said only around 10 to 12 doses of the drug have been made.
Overall the WHO believes that the first tests of the experimental drugs in humans would be done over the next two to four months.
Meanwhile the US department of State has issued “Response to the Ebola Virus” a fact sheet outlining Washington’s efforts to contain the outbreak of the Ebola virus.
The US efforts to battle the deadly virus is based on conglomerate response of a number of US federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to offer “every possible form of assistance to the affected countries, their citizens and international organizations responding to the outbreak, ” State department said.
US authorities have approved a request from Liberia’s government to send sample doses of the experimental ZMapp drug to treat those infected with Ebola, after on Friday, the FDA lifted its hold on one of those drugs being tested in the United States. Also on Friday, US health authorities announced that they are sending extra personnel and resources to Nigeria.
On the home-front the statement reads that US “has a range of steps in place to prevent the introduction, transmission and spread of suspected communicable diseases across the US border.”
US authorities concentrate their efforts on “appropriate procedures are in place for screening both in the region and here in the United States”, as “there is no significant risk to the United States from Ebola.”
Health officials said Sunday that missionaries retuning to the United States after working with patients infected with Ebola will be put in quarantine and monitored, after USA aid worker Nancy Writebol is still in hospital in after contracting Ebola while in West Africa.
There is no treatment or vaccine for Ebola, which has a mortality rate of up to 90 percent. Currently it can be contained if those exposed are swiftly isolated. According to CDC guidelines, medical workers treating Ebola patients should wear protective gowns, goggles, face masks and gloves.
Companies working against the clock to provide treatments include Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, Biocryst Pharmaceuticals and Siga Technologies.
As soon as next month GlaxoSmithKline and American scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases want to conduct a clinical trial after promising test results in primates.
An experimental vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is expected to enter Phase I clinical trials as early as late 2015, while Profectus Biosciences is also working on preclinical vaccine.
A total of 1,848 suspected cases with 1,013 deaths have been reported by the World Health Organization in West Africa, of which 1,176 cases and 660 deaths have been confirmed to be Ebola.
Source
        
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 08:35