Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Tuesday 3 March 2015

The European Union Times



Posted: 02 Mar 2015 07:49 AM PST
Assyrians hold placards and wave their community’s flag as they protest against ISIL abductions in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, February 28, 2015.
Hundreds of Assyrian Christians have staged a rally in Lebanon to censure the recent abduction of over 200 members of the community by ISIL militants in northeastern Syria.
The Christians took to the streets in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, waving their community’s flags and carrying signs that read, “Assyrians are the indigenous people of Mesopotamia,” “We demand action from the United Nations,” and “Save the Christians in the Middle East.”
The marchers called for urgent aid and a safe haven for the minority group in Syria and neighboring Iraq.
They also urged the international community to take action against “genocide and ethnic cleansing” by the ISIL Takfiris.
Meanwhile, Lebanese Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk has said Assyrian Christians fleeing ISIL violence are welcome to take refuge in Lebanon, noting that their “severe humanitarian case” is exceptional and not bound to the recent policy to stop allowing refugees in.
He added that around 5,000 Assyrians are expected to arrive in Lebanon.
According to the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ISIL militants have kidnapped at least 220 Assyrian civilians in Syria’s northeastern province of Hasaka over the past three days.
The Assyrians were abducted from 11 villages near Tel Tamer, a town located about 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the northwest of the provincial capital, Hasaka. The hostages have been taken to Abd al-Aziz mount, which lies southwest of Tel Tamer.
Over the past months, Assyrians, who come from one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, have been under increasing threat from the ISIL terrorists.
The ISIL militants, with members from several Western countries, control some parts of Syria and Iraq, and have been carrying out horrific acts of violence such as public decapitations and crucifixions against all ethnic and religious communities.
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Posted: 02 Mar 2015 07:41 AM PST


Half of the Studies Find Cause For Concern… The Other Half Are Studies By the GMO Food Industry Itself.
Tufts University’s Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute (Timothy Wise) points out:
There is no … consensus on the safety of GM food. A peer-reviewed study of the research, from peer-reviewed journals, found that about half of the animal-feeding studies conducted in recent years found cause for concern. The other half didn’t, and as the researchers noted, “most of these studies have been conducted by biotechnology companies responsible of commercializing these GM plants.”
The only consensus that GM food is safe is among industry-funded researchers.
By way of background, genetically engineered foods have been linked to obesitycancerliver failureinfertility and all sorts of other diseases (brief, must-watch videos here and here).
And genetically-engineered meat isn’t even tested for human safety.
And a leading risk expert says that genetically modified foods could wipe out the global ecosystem.
But government agencies like the FDA go to great lengths to cover up the potential health damage from genetically modified foods, and to keep the consumer in the dark about what they’re really eating. (Indeed, the largest German newspaper – Süddeutsche Zeitung – alleges that the U.S. government helped Monsanto ATTACK THE COMPUTERS of activists opposed to genetically modified food.)
Indeed – as Tufts’ Timothy Wise notes – huge sums of money are being poured into shutting down all honest scientific debate about the risks from GMOs:
Biotechnology companies and their powerful advocates, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are succeeding in a well-planned campaign to get GM safety declared “settled science.”
An indicator was a quiet announcement in the press last summer that the Gates Foundation had awarded a US$5.6 million grant to Cornell University to “depolarize” the debate over GM foods. That’s their word. The grant founded a new institute, the Cornell Alliance for Science.
“Our goal is to depolarize the GMO debate and engage with potential partners who may share common values around poverty reduction and sustainable agriculture, but may not be well informed about the potential biotechnology has for solving major agricultural challenges,” said project leader Sarah Evanega, senior associate director of International Programs in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).
Got it? The Gates Foundation is paying biotech scientists and advocates at Cornell to help them convince the ignorant and brainwashed public, who “may not be well informed,” that they are ignorant and brainwashed.
“Improving agricultural biotechnology communications is a challenge that must be met if innovations developed in public sector institutions like Cornell are ever to reach farmers in their fields,” added Kathryn J. Boor, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of CALS.
It’s kind of like depolarizing an armed conflict by giving one side more weapons.
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Posted: 02 Mar 2015 07:19 AM PST
US Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
US Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “arrogant” man who does not speak for all Jews.
The Jewish lawmaker made the remarks in an interview with CNN on Sunday ahead of Netanyahu’s controversial visit to the United States.
The Israeli premier arrived in Washington, DC, on Sunday night to speak at Congress on Tuesday about the “threat” of a nuclear deal with Iran.
“My responsibility is to worry not only about… Israel, but also the future of the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said on Saturday. “And for that reason, we are strongly opposed to the agreement being formulated between the world powers and Iran that could endanger Israel’s very existence.”
Feinstein said Netanyahu “doesn’t speak for me on this.”
“I think it’s a rather arrogant statement. I think the Jewish community is like any other community. There are different points of view. I think that arrogance does not befit Israel, candidly,” the Californian Democrat said.
US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress. The invitation was extended hours after President Barack Obama threatened to veto any sanctions legislation against Iran during his State of the Union address.
The Obama administration is both angry at Netanyahu’s accepting the Republican invitation to address Congress two weeks before the Israeli election without consulting the White House and excessive Israel lobby interference in American foreign policy.
Netanyahu is scheduled to speak at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbying group on Monday and Congress on Tuesday.
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Posted: 02 Mar 2015 07:03 AM PST


New cases of the inexplicable disorder, dubbed “Sleepy Hollow,” have appeared in Kalachi, the village in Kazakhstan where every tenth villager, including children, has mysteriously fallen asleep in broad daylight, some unable to wake up for days on end.
“The ninth wave of the disease has started,” Amanbek Kalzhanov, head of the administration of Esil district, told Interfax. “Yesterday two people, a man and a woman, became sick. Since the outbreak of the disease 120 people have fallen ill.”
According to Kalzhanov, the overall situation in Kalachi, a village in northern Kazakhstan, is under control. The local hospital is fully operational, along with a school, attended by about 40 students.
Meanwhile, most of the inhabitants of the village, which used to be home to over 600 residents, have agreed to move to other areas, local official Sergey Kulagin said.
“Of the 218 families, 124 expressed a desire to relocate. Thirty-four families (95 people), including 27 children, have already left the village,” he said.
The first cases of the “sleeping epidemic” were reported in March 2013. Everyone in the village has a family member or a friend who has fallen asleep for no apparent reason, according to locals.
“If you try to wake him, it seems he wants to open his eyes – but can’t. He’s sleeping and sleeping…” Igor Samusenko, father of a child who is suffering from the illness, earlier told RTD.
“I’m weak, my legs feel heavy, as if I’m wearing a hundred pairs of boots, and my head is spinning,” a woman told RTD. Other patients may behave “like they’re drunk.”
Despite numerous attempts to find the cause of the inexplicable disorder, the Sleepy Hollow riddle still remains unknown.
Groups of scientists and medics, including virologists, radiologists and toxicologists, have visited the village in an attempt to find the cause of the mystery illness, all in vain.
Last month Professor Leonid Rikhvanov, from the Department of Geo-ecology and Geo-chemistry in the city of Tomsk, said that Soviet-era uranium mines could be to blame, with radon gas from the nearby mines seeping to the surface, poisoning local residents.
Сhildren started falling down on the first day of school in September.
Radon is a colorless, odorless gas that is created through the decay of uranium. Breathing it is believed to cause lung cancer.
“This gas, which causes toxic effects, pushes a person into a dreamlike state, and the person falls asleep,” Rikhvanov said. People have described further symptoms, including hallucinations, memory loss, dizziness and nausea.
Rikhvanov said experts previously failed to detect radon because conventional methods of measuring radiation fail to detect it in the air.
The causes and consequences of the sleepy condition still remain unknown.
While radiation levels in the town and at the mine closest to it are at a normal 16 micro-roentgen per hour, the RTD team’s Geiger counter showed an alarming 268 micro-roentgen per hour at an abandoned, filled-in mineshaft further from the village. However, an independent analysis of Kalachi’s water, soil, and vegetation samples did not detect any abnormalities.
People suffering from the sleeping sickness have been diagnosed with a range of diseases. While children are being treated for toxic encephalopathy (a brain malfunction), adults are said to have suffered strokes. But after several days in intensive care, they are usually back to normal – until they feel abnormally sleepy again. Some doctors assert that mass psychosis is to blame.
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