Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday, 26 September 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 25 Sep 2014 03:56 PM PDT

With the now increased traffic in the Red Planet’s region since India’s satellite reached Mars’s orbit Wednesday, a traffic light might just be what’s been missing. And it didn’t take long for one to be discovered.
NASA’s Mars rover, the Curiosity, which has been exploring the planet for over two years, fitted with 17 cameras, sent a picture of something that looks much like Earth’s traffic lights.
The mobile robot submits plenty of curious pictures from the surface of Mars, which are on public display. This time it was a space enthusiast from the UK, Joe Smith, running an ArtAlienTV YouTube channel, who spotted a striking resemblance.

“I have been following the images from NASA since the start and I flick through them on the NASA website every day. I saw this one and I thought, ‘Hang on, that looks a bit strange.’ I think it looks like a traffic light,” Smith said of a stack of several large rocks from the footage.
“It is hard to tell how big it would be without any point of reference, but I would estimate it was about 12 inches,” Smith said, adding that he “posted it on the internet and people said they thought it looked like a set of traffic lights, too.”

And there is also that natural perfectly-shaped ball on a flat rock surface.
According to NASA scientists, the spherical Mars rock is not as big as it looks – it’s only about two-fifths of an inch wide, and is most likely a “concretion,” a hard solid mass formed by matter accumulation, Discovery News reported.
The number of compelling images from the Red Planet might now increase, with India becoming the first Asian country to reach the planet. After positioning itself in the planet’s orbit, the country’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) satellite immediately signed up on Twitter.
The @MarsOrbiter is already communicating with NASA’s Curiosity, and provides updates on the mission.
Among other Mars images causing quite a stir among space buffs was a strong artificial light emanating from the planet’s surface, “flower petals,” the 1976 “face of Mars,” and even a lost Soviet lander.
In 2020, the US space agency plans to send a new rover to the planet, which will aim to not only document the images of Mars’s surface, but also at locating and extracting its formations, to take samples back to Earth. Until then, we can just look at these rocks and guess.
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Posted: 25 Sep 2014 03:48 PM PDT

The Australian Senate has passed new national security laws that could put journalists behind bars for up to 10 years for merely reporting on terrorism-related subjects, Press TV reports.
The bill proposed by the government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott was unanimously adopted by the Senate on Thursday and is to be sent to the House of Representatives for final approval.
The legislation, dubbed the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill, will give Australia’s spy agency, ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organization), stronger powers to access personal computers and spy on Australians overseas.
According to the anti-terrorism law, anyone including journalists, whistleblowers and bloggers who “recklessly” discloses “information…[that] relates to a special intelligence operation” faces up to 10 years in prison.
Analysts believe the new legislation, if adopted, would not only affect journalists who are simply trying to do their job, but seriously infringe on the privacy of all internet users in Australia.
In an interview with Press TV, Tim Anderson, a professor at the University of Sydney, criticized the new laws proposed by the Canberra administration and warned against the gradual “destruction of liberties and the expansion of the police state in Australia.”
In June this year, Peter Greste, an Australian journalist, was jailed for seven years in Egypt after being convicted of aiding the country’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, a sentence slammed as “chilling and draconian” by some Western states.
The sentence was sharply condemned by the Australia at the time. However, the new bill approved by the Senate could see the journalists in the country facing the same fate.
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Posted: 25 Sep 2014 03:41 PM PDT


Eric Holder will announce his resignation as U.S. attorney general today, according to officials within the Justice Department.
Holder will remain at the position, which he has held for six years, until his successor is confirmed.
Holder’s tenure, which included attempts to dismantle the Second Amendment through Operation Fast and Furious and Operation Choke Point, was plagued with controversy and scandal.
Whether it be protecting big banks, attacking the Second Amendment or helping to cover up illegal activity in the IRS, Holder’s crimes are countless in number.
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Posted: 25 Sep 2014 03:36 PM PDT
An elderly patient in a wheelchair at a hospital in England.
An NHS regulatory has claimed that around 10,000 patients are killed each year by the “dangerously” variable treatment by hospital and doctors in England.
According to a report published in The Guardian on Tuesday, Care Quality Commission (CQC) chair David Prior warned that many patients receive poor care which leads to many thousands of avoidable patient deaths each year.
In the article, Prior claimed that “any assessment of the National Health Service (NHS) can only have one possible conclusion,” and that is care standards are sometimes dangerously highly variable.
“We have some outstanding hospitals, we have some inadequate hospitals. And the variation in primary care between different GP practices is probably even greater,” he said.
CQC inspectors visited 40 hospitals in England since March, grading five with the lowest ranking of “inadequate”.
While explaining the risk caused by the NHS care quality variation, Prior said not only does it matter that anywhere between “3,000 and 10,000” people die avoidably each year, but it “also matters because variation strikes at the heart of the NHS and its core principle that everyone should receive good quality care free at the point of delivery. In fact they do not.”
Prior’s estimate is actually lower than the one by British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, which puts the annual deaths caused by NHS staff at around 12,000
Hunt said “utterly, utterly shocking [things] are happening week in, week out in our NHS”, for example feeding tubes are inserted into patient’s lungs instead of their stomach.
Established in 2009, the CQC is a non-departmental public body of the British government, formed to regulate and inspect health and social care services in England.
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Posted: 25 Sep 2014 01:57 PM PDT

The Catalan parliament has passed a law giving its regional president the power to carry out a non-binding consultation vote on secession from Spain. Catalan nationalists believe this law enables them to hold the long-awaited independence referendum.
On Friday, the Catalan parliament voted in favor of the new law, with 106 MPs supporting it and 28 voting against.
The MPs hope it will bring Catalan President Artur Mas a step closer to the planned independence referendum on November 9.
However, while the nationalist block thinks the bill directly paves the way for a referendum on independence, the Catalan socialists who allied with them for the vote do not share this opinion.
The Spanish government called the Catalan consultation vote illegal and said it will be taking the matter up at the Constitutional Court. The court has the power to suspend the vote after it hears the case on Tuesday.
Madrid maintains that any kind of secession vote has to be decided by the whole country, citing Spain’s 1978 constitution.
Catalonia’s new law comes right after Scotland voted “No” to independence, but Mas said that the people should not see it as a discouraging sign.
Mas stressed that the fact Scotland had a referendum to decide on this issue was “key.”
“This is a powerful and strong message that the UK is sending to the entire world – that if there is such a conflict elsewhere in the world you have the right way to try to resolve these differences,” he said.
Scotland “has shown the way to others – the Catalan process continues,” Mas added.
The Catalan independence movement has grown from strength to strength over the last few years, gathering momentum against a backdrop of EU financial crisis. The autonomous region of Catalonia has a population of 7.5 million and accounts for almost one-quarter of Spain’s GDP.
On September 12, Europe saw one of the largest demonstrations in recent years: at least 1.8 million people formed an 11km red-yellow line to show their support for the upcoming independence referendum.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 08:49