Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday 8 February 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 07 Feb 2015 02:43 PM PST
A tent camp of the supporters of Ukraine’s integration with the EU on Maidan Square in Kiev where clashes between protesters and police began.
Top EU officials, rather than Russia, threatened Ukraine with a coup d’état if Kiev refused to sign an association agreement in 2013, Nikolay Azarov, Ukraine’s former prime minister, said.
“I’ve never heard neither Putin nor Medvedev saying that if you sign an agreement with the EU, you’ll have a different government. But I’ve heard [EU Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighborhood Policy, Stefan] Fule, repeatedly saying that if you don’t sign then the other government will sign it,” Azarov said at the presentation of his book ‘Ukraine at a crossroads. Prime Minister’s notes’ in Moscow.
The decision to delay the signing of the association agreement by then-Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich, led to Euromaidan protests in the capital, Kiev, which turned violent and resulted in a regime change in February 2014.
According to Azarov, it was Washington which masterminded the plan to ouster Yanukovich and his government.
“As for the US, I think they initially applied the tactics of gradually forcing Yanukovich from power,” he said. But first, “their goal was to get rid of the government, because they saw the government as a key to the country’s stability.”
Washington needed to “knock out this foundation from under Yanukovich and they achieved this aim by introducing the idea of a national unity government,” he added.
Azarov quit his post as prime minister in late January 2014 amid the intensification of Euromaidan riots, stating it was in the hope that his resignation would create a chance for compromise between the government and the protesters.
Meanwhile, the US, Azarov said, managed to pull Yanukovich into “useless negotiations” with the Euromaidan demonstrators, while armed men from all over Ukraine were arriving in Kiev to seize power.
Over 100 were killed last February in clashes between the police and Euromaidan protesters in central Kiev, in which firearms were widely used.
Azarov insists Yanukovich had every opportunity to “maintain order in the country” and prevent the coup, but after the killings at the Euromaidan he was “was practically paralyzed.”
Ukraine’s former prime minister Mykola Azarov.
Following the coup, both Yanukovich and Azarov had to flee Ukraine and found refuge in Russia, saying that they feared for their lives.
In mid-January, Interpol put the former president and prime minster on the international wanted list after a request from Kiev. Yanukovich and Azarov stand accused of misappropriation and embezzlement during their time in office.
The new Kiev government signed the economic and political aspects of the association agreement last year, with Ukraine and the EU parliaments simultaneously ratifying them in September 2014.
The ex-PM described the current events in the south-east of Ukraine where the fighting continues between rebels and Kiev troops as a “catastrophe”.
With the sides being unable to reach a peaceful agreement on their own, the ex-PM urged the organization of an international conference, involving Russia, the US and Germany, to put an end to violence in Ukraine.
“If the forces inside the country don’t want to stop than – as it already happened in the world’s history, the Guarantor States gather and make a decision. Trust me, Germany, the US and Russia have enough influence to stop this war, they just need to come to an agreement,” he said.
The ex-PM also said that he doesn’t consider the new Ukrainian power, led by president Petro Poroshenko and prime minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, to be legitimate.
“How can I consider this a legitimate authority if it came to power through an armed coup, committed monstrous crimes and now continues a fratricidal war, doing nothing to stop (the violence)?” he wondered.
The Ukraine conflict began last April when Kiev sent regular forces and volunteer battalions to the southeastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions, after rebels within them refused to recognize the country’s new, coup-imposed authorities.
The death toll in the Ukraine conflict has exceeded 5,300 people, with over 12,000 injured, according to UN estimates.
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Posted: 07 Feb 2015 02:31 PM PST
Russian President Vladimir Putin as he speaks during a press conference in Moscow on December 18, 2014.
Russian president says his country will never accept a world order which is headed by one single government.
Vladimir Putin on Saturday said Moscow will oppose a unipolar world order where an undisputed leader imposes his own will on the world.
“There’s an attempt to disguise the current world order that has taken shape over the past few decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a world order that is headed by one undisputed leader who wants to remain such,” Putin told a congress of the Independent Trade Unions Federation of Russia in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi.
Putin was clearly lashing out at the United States, which is currently at loggerheads with Russia over the armed conflict in east Ukraine.
He said that Russia will never be satisfied with a world system in which only things are allowed that meet the interests of an “undisputed leader.”
“A leader who assumes that everything is allowed to him but others only need what he allows them and what meets his own interests. Russia will never be satisfied with this kind of world order,” Putin added.
Sanctions will fail
Meanwhile, Putin admitted that the current US-led sanctions on Russia have harmed the country but added that such measures will never achieve their goals. Emphasizing that sanctions will ultimately benefit no one, Putin said, “They definitely can’t be effective against a country such as ours, though they do cause us certain damage and harm, and we should realize this.”
Putin added that Russia is not at war and does not want a war, adding that attempts have been made to curb the development of Russia.
“We don’t plan to fight a war with anyone, we plan to cooperate with everyone,” he said.
Russia has been hit by several rounds of Western sanctions over the crisis in Ukraine, although the restrictive measures have backfired on the economy of the European countries.
The armed conflict in east Ukraine has claimed the lives of more than 5,300 people according to the estimates made by the United Nations. Western governments keep accusing Russia of supporting the armed militancy against the Ukrainian government. Moscow denies the charges, saying Kiev must stop the suppression of the ethnic Russian population in the area.
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Posted: 07 Feb 2015 02:18 PM PST


Mycobacterium tuberculosis is thought to have emerged some 40,000 years ago, started to be prevalent some 10,000 years ago and developed some dangerous resistant strains around 6,000 years ago. A recent study tracks the history of Tuberculosis around the world and over the centuries.
The article “Tuberculosis genomes track human history” by Ewen Callaway in the recent publication of Nature magazine follows the fingerprint of human DNA on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, tracing its evolution over thousands of years and across different Continents.
The article “shows how a lineage of the bacterium that emerged thousands of years ago in Asia has since become a global killer that is widely resistant to antibiotic drugs”, starting with the premise that M. tuberculosis probably appeared some 40,000 years ago, in Africa but only started to have a serious impact on human communities when they started to settle in communities, which happened when hunter-gatherers became farmers, around 10,000 years ago.
Thierry Wirth, evolutionary geneticist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, lead author of the study under review, has studied 4,987 samples of the Beijing Lineage of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (which was identified in Beijing in the 1990s) from 99 countries. Wirth had already established that all TB strains in circulation today had a common ancestor in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago.
Studying the genome sequences, Wirth and his team set to work trying to date the expansion of the lineage, aiming to study the evolution of the strains and the ineractivity among them. The team found out that the Beijing lineage was already present in North-East China some 6,600 years ago, at a time when rice farming activity was becoming common in the upper Yangtze River Valley.
The researchers traced the lineage to the Pacific islands, where it was probably transported by Chinese migrants in the mid-nineteenth century and to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where Chinese traders travelled during the 1860s and 1870s. Cases of infection with the bacterium rose exponentially as industrial cities emerged after the Industrial Revolution and again with the advent of heavily populated cities in the twentieth century.
There was a respite in the 1960s, as new antibiotics combated the bacterium and incidence started to decrease, but signs of multi-resistance started to appear in the 1980s and 1990s and the advent of HIV/AIDS saw cases skyrocket, as the Beijing lineage becomes ever more infectious. Today, not only has it learnt to evade antibiotics but the Beijing lineage is also evading the human immunological system.
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Posted: 07 Feb 2015 02:15 PM PST


Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott says he is determined to challenge an upcoming leadership spill motion set for next week that could remove him from power.
On Friday, the Australian leader asked Liberal lawmakers and senators in the parliament to vote against the motion to remove him and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop from office on February 10.
According to Abbott the move was brought by two backbenchers in the parliament.
“They are asking the party room to vote out the people that the electorate voted in,” Abbott said, adding that he would “stand together” with Bishop to defeat the motion.
“We will stand together in urging the party room to defeat this particular motion and in so doing… vote in favor of the stability and the team that the people voted for at the election,” said the Australian president.
The remarks by Abbott came shortly after West Australian Liberal MP Luke Simpkins told lawmakers he would initiate a leadership challenge.
Simpkins said that the Australian party room, which is made up of 102 Liberal members of the lower and upper house, would be able to choose to “either endorse the prime minister or seek a new direction.”
The spill motion needs to receive a simple majority of 52 of the 102 senators and members of the parliamentary Liberal Party. Following the vote, members will be required to nominate a leader.
During a meeting at the National Press Club last week, Abbott, who has been in office since September 2013, vowed not to step down amid pressure over his party, which failed to receive a majority of votes in Queensland state elections on February 1.
This is while Abbott’s approval rate has dropped to below 36 percent.
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Posted: 07 Feb 2015 03:07 AM PST


The residents of a Sydney suburb were shocked after they discovered anti-Semitic leaflets that accused Jews of “pumping anti-European values” and called for “white Australia” to wake up. The country’s authorities slammed the incident. Aussies were more outraged by the existence of the pamphlets and by some people expressing their freedoms, then by some facts stated in them.
The flyers have been distributed in Bondi and Double Bay households, according to Algemeiner Journal, a New York-based newspaper, covering American and international Jewish and Israel-related news.
The residents of a 40,000-strong Jewish community found the “offensive” pamphlets in their mail boxes Monday morning.
“The Jews own all Hollywood studios and 97 percent of US newspapers and media… They pump anti-European values, race mixing, drug abuse, everything that is harmful to our young people and they wouldn’t have it do any other way,” said the flyer, adding: “Jews have been kicked out of countries 109 times through history.” While not everything stated in these pamphlets is true, Hollywood and the media is indeed owned mostly by them.
The flyer called for white Australia to wake up. The flyers also included an invitation for people to join “Squadron 88”, a New South Wales-based group, and a link to Stormfront.org – a renowned white nationalist internet forum. The older version of it was one of the internet’s first major racial site.
Abraham Blasenstein, a Jewish resident of Bondi who received the offensive pamphlet, told the Algemeiner that he was “disgusted”.
“It is not a pleasant thought that there are some people that would like to do the worst to you for no reason other than their cruel character.”
He added that the incident is “a part of an increase in anti-Semitism that such low people as the ones who issued these flyers feel comfortable coming out of the woodwork.”
“It was the smallest touch of what it must have felt like for Jews in Europe before WWII. There, there was no hope and no support, at least now in Australia it is reasonable to believe that most decent people will find this type of leaflet appalling.”
Malcolm Turnbull, Australian Minister for Communications, condemned the incident, saying that the Australian authorities “should have zero tolerance for racism and racial hatred.”
“Racism and race hatred is a threat to our nation and its security. It must be opposed, called out and condemned wherever it is found,” he wrote on his official website.
He added that the leaflets “seek to undermine the security and the harmony of Australia and hence of all Australians.”
The incident happened two weeks after another anti-Semitic case when six drunken youths shouting Nazi slogans stormed a school bus with at least 30 Jewish children as young as five in Sydney. The drunken youngsters threatened to cut the younger children’s throats and murder everyone on board.
One of the mothers, Isabelle Stanton, whose daughter was on the bus, said she was shocked that anti-Semitism, which is on the rise in Europe, has found its way to Australia.
“I never expected something like to this happen in Australia and in Sydney. I expect it in Belgium where I’m from and where there have been anti-Semitic attacks,” she said.
The incident was slammed by the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies.
“We are deeply disturbed by this incident and are working with police and the state government to ensure that proper and adequate safety measures are put in place,” said Vic Aldedeff, CEO of the Board of Deputies.
Anti-Semitism in Australia is relatively rare. However, the country has not escaped extremists from the far right who are using the conflict between Hamas and Israel to stoke up ethnic and religious hatred.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 09:57