Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday, 20 October 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 20 Oct 2014 12:34 AM PDT


For centuries, people sincerely believed that the dead can rise from their graves. The most famous character is Dracula. In Lower Saxony, Germany, archaeologists found evidence to prove the existence of such zombies.
Legends about vampires and zombies accompany the literary history of mankind. Not that long ago, in the area of ​​the town of Stade (a Hanseatic town in Germany, located in Lower Saxony, between Hamburg and Cuxhaven) a bizarre finding was made, which gave archaeologists reasons to think that they found something that proved the existence of the living dead.
Scientists came to conclusion that our ancestors were not trying to resurrect the dead. On the contrary – they were trying not to let the deceased rise from their graves.
Ludwig Strackerjan, a German national, has an extensive collection of superstitions and legends that he gathered in the duchy of Oldenburg. According to him, more than 150 years ago, the dead were supposed to be buried along with their clothes, a spoon and a needle, with which they could mend their ragged robes. As soon as the coffin would be taken out of the house, people would put down the fire in the hearth. Interestingly, the dead would be buried in fairly deep pits.
What if someone forgot to put out the fire in the hearth, or put a needle in the coffin? In this case, the living would face serious problems as the dead would rise from the grave, becoming a ghost or a zombie.
Archaeologist Daniel Nösler found something near the town of Stade that proved such practices. Demonstrating old photographs of excavations in the former monastery of Harsefeld, Nösler pointed to a strange boulder next to the skull. The large boulder crushed the skull of the deceased individual. As it appears, the boulder was unlikely to have rolled into the grave. It took the efforts of two strong men to remove the boulder from the remains.
“The soil at this cemetery looks like it has been sifted, there are not even small pebbles and gravel there,” the archaeologist from Stade said in an interview with spiegel.de. The man also said that the soil in the area was of a slightly different shade than the ground found inside the grave. The boulder could not find itself in the grave incidentally. The grave had been unearthed after the dead had been staying there for a while.
Indeed, the undead is common in the folklore of Northern Germany. For example, there is a tale about a poor woman from Brake, who promised another woman to take care of her burial for 15 thalers. When the woman died, the other woman used the payment for her own needs, contrary to her promise.
The dead woman would then come to look for her money every night. In the end, the woman was declared outlawed, and the dead calmed down. This is a usual end for such stories, although, unfortunately, there are no details provided on to how the undead would be declared outlawed.
After Nosler told his colleagues about the story of the grave in Harsefeld, Dietrich Alsdorf recalled another curious burial that had been previously found in the area. Thirty-two years ago, in the western part of the cloister of Harsefeld monastery, a coffin was unearthed. The coffin had been buried in an unusual manner, with its lid down, the researcher said.
In addition, there were bricks found on the tomb, whereas the coffin had been buried deeper than usual. Someone definitely wanted to bury that dead person for sure, the researcher believes.
The two mysterious graves of the “living dead” are dated back to the XIV or XV century. “It was a time of large-scale epidemics, – explains Nosler. – If one died, he or she would often be followed by other family members. It was a widespread belief that the dead would grab the living and drag them into the nether world.”
In medieval German legends, there were other types of undead creatures described – the so-called Nachzehrer (derived from a verb meaning extinction, loss, depletion or exhaustion of man). Those creatures were like vampires, but they were somewhat different.
If a piece of shroud would inadvertently find itself near the dead person’s mouth, the dead would suck on it to obtain vitality and suck the lifeblood out from all those who had touched the piece of cloth before.
In the village of Oldendorf, located in the lower Elbe, Nosler and his colleagues found a Nachzehrer. In the burial from the XI or the XII century, an upper arm bone was resting across the neck of the dead. The bone, the researchers believe, was supposed not to let the shroud touch the dead person’s mouth.
“Now we know that in these places, people did believe in the undead, and we will seek for more evidence,” the researchers said.
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Posted: 19 Oct 2014 03:17 PM PDT
Ebola Response Roadmap 10 October 2014 (World Health Organization)
President Barack Obama authorized the Pentagon to call up members of the National Guard and other military reserve units on Thursday to help combat the spread of Ebola in West Africa.
Obama said the guardsmen would “augment the active forces in support of Operation United Assistance, providing humanitarian assistance and consequence management related to the Ebola virus disease outbreak in the West Africa region” in a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Hill reported.
The Defense Department is expected to send eight engineers and logistical specialists from the Guard ‒ both active-duty and reservists ‒ during the first deployment, sources told NBC News. They are likely to help build 17 Ebola treatment centers, with 100 beds apiece.
The Guard members would join the nearly 4,000 regular troops deploying to West Africa in the coming weeks in an effort to contribute in the fight against the Ebola virus outbreak in the region, according to the Pentagon.
Obama signed the executive order Thursday afternoon, permitting the Pentagon to use the reservists and Guard troops, the Associated Press reported. The DOD said the use of an executive order was necessary to speed the deployments, and would allow the president to send additional forces as needed, according to NBC News. Obama also notified top congressional officials of his move.
Thursday evening, the president met with Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Thomas Frieden and top White House officials in the Oval Office. He spoke to reporters afterwards, saying it might be appropriate to appoint an additional person to coordinate the response to Ebola in the United States. There have been increasing calls from the press and politicians that Obama name an “Ebola czar.”
Obama also discussed the possibility of a travel ban from the five West African countries where the outbreak began. He said that while he doesn’t have a “philosophical objection” to such a ban, he has been advised against it by health experts.
“History shows that there is a likelihood of increased avoidance (that could lead to) more cases rather than less,” Obama said. “The problem is that ‒ in all the discussions that I’ve had thus far with experts in the field, experts in infectious disease… a travel ban is less effective than the measures that we are currently instituting.”
There are nearly 9,000 suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola in West Africa, according to the CDC. Almost 4,500 people have died from the virus so far. The biggest outbreak is in Liberia, where US troops will be sent to provide humanitarian assistance. Widespread transmission is also occurring in Guinea and Sierra Leone, while there has been localized transmission in Nigeria, Spain and the United States. Senegal has had a travel-associated case.
The World Bank predicted last Wednesday that the spread of Ebola presents a $33 billion threat to West African economies if the disease isn’t contained. Earlier that week, scientists predicted that there was a 75 percent chance that Ebola would reach France by the end October and a 50 percent chance for the UK.
Ebola infections in West Africa could hit 1.4 million by the end of January if current trends continue and no immediate, large-scale increase in response measures is taken, the CDC said in a September estimate.
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Posted: 19 Oct 2014 02:51 PM PDT


The US Federal Reserve chair has expressed concern about increasing wealth inequality in the US, saying the richest five percent of Americans hold 63 percent of the country’s wealth.
Janet Yellen made the remarks at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Economic Conference on Inequality of Economic Opportunity on Friday.
According to her, those at the very top have made significant income gains while the majority of Americans are living a stagnant life.
“The wealthiest 5 percent of American households held 54 percent of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61 percent in 2010 and reached 63 percent in 2013,” she said.
Yellen added, “By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million held 43 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 36 percent in 2013.”
She suggested increased education and encouraging small businesses as two solutions to tackle the problem.
The Fed chair went on to say that the lower half of households by wealth held only three percent of wealth in 1989 and just one percent last year.
She said that income and wealth inequality are at their highest levels since the 19th century.
She added that the rift has seen its most sustained rise over the last decades and it has even widened during US economic recovery in recent years. “The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades, to a greater extent than in most advanced countries.”
According to a study by Harvard University, the growing income inequality in the US between the richest Americans and the middle and lower classes is “unsustainable” and may worsen.
The study, released last month by the Harvard Business School and titled “An Economy Doing Half its Job”, highlighted problems with the widening US wealth gap, education system, transport infrastructure, and the effectiveness of the political system.
The study said that while large US companies were recovering their competitiveness internationally, workers continue to struggle for better pay and benefits.
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Posted: 19 Oct 2014 02:38 PM PDT

A brand new device, called Miriam, could simplify regular cancer screenings.
Early cancer detection can save millions of lives but current diagnostic methods remain costly and invasive. However, a new startup is developing a device which could detect dozens of cancers with a single blood test.
The Miriam test platform was recently presented at the TEDGlobal 2014 conference in Rio de Janeiro by Jorge Soto, a cancer technologist. He promised that it would make cancer detection at the molecular level “easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before.”
Named “one of the most thrilling demos in TED history” by conference curator Chris Anderson, Miriam is a compact, $500, 3D-printed device that, nevertheless, can detect several kinds of cancer: pancreatic, lung, breast and hepatic and it is only the beginning, according to its makers, who have decided to make its design open-source.
The device is based on state-of-the-art molecular biology, and the latest scientific discoveries in the field of microRNA, a class of tiny biological regulator molecules, discovered in 1993. They can be used as a “perfect, highly sensitive biomarker,” as their levels vary in the blood, forming specific patterns characterizing different types of cancer, even at the early stages.
“You don’t need to wait until you have any symptoms, you don’t need to know which disease you are looking for, you only need 1 milliliter of blood and a relatively simple array of tools,” the company’s blog stated.
The blood sample is pipetted into a 96-well plate with patented biochemical reagents, which is then loaded into the device for about an hour. A smartphone, put on top of the device, takes pictures, documenting the pace of the reaction that reveals the microRNA strings by lighting up the well green. The data is then sent to the online database for interpretation of the diagnosis.
“We’re talking about a decentralized system; the main challenge is to make it robust enough so it can be done by an untrained person anywhere in the world in not-so-optimal laboratory conditions,” molecular biologist Fay Christodoulou said.
Each of the 96 wells of the plate has patented Miroculus biochemistry that is looking for a specific microRNA.
The Miroculus company’s founders met at a graduate studies program at Singularity University, which is held annually at the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, California, and gives talented participants an opportunity to develop their own business idea for helping people globally – in just 10 weeks.
They were inspired by the lack of proper means for cancer detection.
“We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any,” Soto said, backing the idea that current technologies operate mainly for cancer at stage 3 or 4, when symptoms of the deadly disease appear – which is “too expensive for humanity.”
Medicine nowadays uses imaging techniques, such as X-rays or MRI scans, endoscopy and various blood tests, each supposed to detect a particular type of cancer – all quite costly and not perfect. To detect the disease at early stages scientists have developed screening programs. But not all cancers can be screened and their tests are not always precise. However, the only absolutely reliable source of information is considered to be cancer biopsy, a cell sample – a procedure that may take a few days and cost up to $10,000.
Nonetheless, however democratized and effective Miriam seems to be, it has met some challenges. According to cancer researcher Muneesh Tewari, “There are so many stories of biomarkers that get discovered, and then there are things you didn’t know that basically kill the marker.”
He explained that “Bringing the device to the point where, in fact, it is robust and reliable when you put it in the hands of a large number of people who are truly untrained, that’s always the next barrier to be overcome.”
But Tewari also called the new project an idea that is “very powerful, and important, and could really be potentially transformative.”
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Posted: 19 Oct 2014 01:47 PM PDT

A new report from the Office of the President (OP) circulating in the Kremlin today states that President Putin’s warning of a potential nuclear war crisis with the United States is based upon reports from the Federal Security Service (FSB) seeming to show that the Obama regime deliberately caused the spread of the ebola virus in the West African nation of Liberia and then embarked upon a massive cover-up to conceal this crime against humanity.
Putin’s warning, this report says, was contained in an interview this past week with the Serbian newspaper Politika in which he decried the Obama regimes suspension of the Russia-US Bilateral Presidential Commission wherein he stated, “We hope that our partners will realize the futility of attempts to blackmail Russia and remember what consequences discord between major nuclear powers could bring for strategic stability.”
The “critical importance” of the Russia-US Bilateral Presidential Commission (established in 2009) to Putin’s nuclear war warning, this report continues, was its Health Working Group that had begun working on protocol and procedures to combat the ebola virus outbreak in West Africa this past spring.
The Russia Chairperson of the Health Working Group is Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova, while her American counterpart was Admiral-Doctor Nicole Lurie of the United States Commissioned Corp of the US Public Health Service (USCCPHS), until her dismissal from this posting by Obama on 11 September when he announced new sanctions on Russia.
Important to note about Admiral-Doctor Nicole Lurie, this report states, is her position as leading the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) that was created by the 2006 US law called the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) [Public Law No. 109-417] which makes her the United States top official during times of disease outbreaks or other such emergencies.


Without “logical explanation”, however, this report notes, Obama not only “sidelined” Admiral-Doctor Nicole Lurie from performing her legal duties during this current ebola virus outbreak, along with the nearly 7,000 other Commissioned Officers under her command, including 840 of them at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but appointed Ronald A. “Ron” Klain to replace her.
Klain, this report shockingly notes, not only doesn’t have any medical experience whatsoever, he’s a high-powered lobbyist who helped the corrupt Fannie Mae to overcome “regulatory issues” in 2004 and is a “fixer” who is well-connected and knows his way around the executive branch whose skill is fixing PR problems, not logistics.
Along with losing Admiral-Doctor Nicole Lurie, this report grimly continues, the American people also lose the expertise of her forces tiered system of response to disease outbreaks described as:
“Tier 1 response teams ready and able to respond to an event within 12 hours, and Tier 2 teams ready and able to respond within 36 hours. Officers not on Tier 1 or 2 teams are Tier 3 responders, ready and able to respond to an event in 72 hours. Tier 1 teams are primarily made up of Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) teams that are made up of over 100 officers with multiple specialties, and are focused on providing acute clinical care of disaster-exacerbated chronic conditions.”
Most shockingly to note, this report continues, were the agreements made by Admiral-Doctor Nicole Lurie and the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Well-Being (Rospotrebnadzor) this past August to deploy both Russian and US RDF forces to the West African nations of Liberia and Guinea to jointly fight the ebola virus outbreak that were scuttled by Obama.
Where in August, this report explains, Guinea welcomed Rospotrebnadzor RDF forces, Liberia rejected them withconfidential sources stating “the rejection did not meet the will and pleasure of the Liberian government, as it was constrained to do so because of alleged pressure from Uncle Sam.” [Uncle Sam is pseudo-political appellation used in referring to the United States, world's only Super Power and Liberia's reliable ally.]

Though the Obama regime on 16 September (5 days after suspending the joint Russian-US Health Working Group) did announce that it was preparing to deploy 65 Commissioned Corps officers of Admiral-Doctor Nicole Lurie’s forces to Liberia to manage and staff a previously announced Department of Defense (DoD) hospital to care for healthcare workers who become ill, this report notes, it further ordered them to not have any contact with their Russian counterparts in Guinea.
With Liberian deaths from the ebola virus outbreak that are under US supervision now described as “far higher than reported”, this report says, Guinea’s President Alpha Conde expressed this week his deep gratitude to the Russian Federation for the help it is providing in fighting ebola. According to him, “the level of organization and the performance … of Rospotrebnadzor’s team in the Republic of Guinea are very high and hold out a hope that the joint effort will help to overcome the current crisis caused by the outbreak of Ebola virus.”
What can be said about the ebola fight in Guinea though, this report continues, cannot be said of the US itself as the Obama regime continues to ignore the mounting evidence of the ebola virus rapidly mutating and that its 21-day quarantine is grossly insufficient, as new studies confirm at least 31-days or more are needed to ensure patients are free of this disease.
But perhaps the most alarming information in this report is its detailing that the Obama regime has been conducting “Pandemic Drills” over the past year during the current ebola crisis that are eerily similar to the June 2001 Bioterror Exercise that foreshadowed 9/11 and the Anthrax Attacks upon America.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 09:06