Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday, 26 March 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 26 Mar 2015 01:14 AM PDT


International rating agency Moody’s has downgraded the long-term issuer rating of Ukraine to the second lowest Ca grade from Caa3, leaving the outlook negative and a high possibility of the country’s imminent default.
“Although negotiations over the specific details of the restructuring are only now getting underway, Moody’s believes that the likelihood of a distressed exchange, and hence a default on government debt taking place, is virtually one hundred percent,” Moody’s said in a news release Tuesday.
Another reason for downgrading Ukraine’s rating is that foreign private lenders are expected to incur substantial losses due to the government’s plan of restructuring the bonds it has issued or guaranteed, the agency said.
In the future the recovery of their value will depend on the terms of the debt exchange that is now being discussed with creditors. The terms could include a grace period on principal repayments during the term of the IMF program, and a reduction in the existing bonds’ current coupons, which average 7.1 percent.
The negative outlook reflects the agency’s expectation that the level of Ukrainian external debt will remain very high, despite plans to restructure the debt and carry out reforms.
The Ukrainian authorities are trying to agree a restructuring plan for the country’s $15.3 billion debt with international lenders over the next four years.
Moody’s leaves open the possibility of downgrading Ukraine another step lower if the bondholders suffer greater losses than the Ca level permits, or if the default spreads to other of country’s obligations.
At the same time, the outlook could become stable should the geopolitical and financial situation in Ukraine improve.
Apart from downgrading Ukraine’s issuer rating the agency also lowered the country ceiling for long-term foreign currency debt to Caa3 from Caa2, and its country ceiling for long-term domestic currency debt and deposits to Caa2 from Caa1 – all highly speculative with little prospect for recovery.
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Posted: 25 Mar 2015 06:03 AM PDT


What were the prerequisites for Russia to reunite with the Crimea and Sevastopol? What consequences did the move have for Russia, Ukraine and the world at large? Pravda.Ru asked these and other questions to President of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov.
Tell us about the history of the Crimea. How did Russians, Tatars and people of other nations end up living there?
The deeper we look into the history, the less the clarity we can see, so we need to limit ourselves with a certain period of time if we want to understand which nation is the master of this or that territory. In fact, in ancient times, there were Greek colonies in Crimea. Then the Pechenegs came there. A threat was looming for the south of the then Kievan Rus back during those years. From the Crimean peninsula, they would often attack the wound Ukrainians to rob them and take away into captivity.
There were large slave markets in Hersonissos and Korsun. The love of many Ukrainians to fat developed historically. When the Crimean Khanate was making its raids, they would not take pigs – they would capture the rest of the livestock and domestic birds. Afterwards, Russia got stronger and did not want to tolerate that anymore. Russia could protect both her land, the people of the future Ukraine. The Crimean Khanate was destroyed, and the areas were annexed to Russia for the sake of public safety, first and foremost. That was a fair geopolitical conquest.
It is important that Russia would always develop the newly conquered territories, including the Crimea and Novorossiya. After the Russian victory, the Great and Little Russians started occupying the new land. Russia considered all the conquered people, including Muslims, her citizens.
And suddenly, during the Soviet times, it occurs to Nikita Khrushchev to deliver Crimea to Ukraine. It was not even legally formalized. What was the reason for such a move?
Well, first of all, that was due to Khrushchev’s limited brain. No matter what Khrushchev did, he would fail. There was a joke during the 1960s – one had to be a genius to leave Russia without bread. Khrushchev was that genius. Everybody remembers his passion for maize, including fields of maize in the Arctic. He did not like science. He was a man of emotions plus low education.
In the defense sector, Khrushchev saw that the USSR had rockets, and considered it sufficient. He cut all aviation and navy. He would make all decisions hastily. He gave Crimea to Ukraine in honor of the tercentenary of reunification.
A year ago, everything changed in Ukraine. What happened to Ukrainians?
First, I would like to throw a stone at Yeltsin. After all, when Yeltsin made the decision to destroy the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian elite, including Mr. Kravchuk, were putting pressure on him to sign a new union treaty. If Yeltsin had been a sensible man, and far-sighted strategist, he would have ordered to return all the land that Russia had given to other republics. One had to start with Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. For the sake of personal power and ambition Yeltsin did not think about it much. He did not want to depend on any political bureaus and congresses.
All the same, during the times of the Soviet Union, and even after its collapse, the Crimeans always considered themselves Russians, not Ukrainians. When Russia and Ukraine became independent states, the Crimeans were living in a hope to return to Russia. Sevastopol is a historical Russian city – you can see Russian history there everywhere. Those people were dreaming to return to Russia.
When the Kiev junta staged the coup in Kiev, the Crimeans said that they would not be a part of all that fascism. It was the Crimeans who started the operation. There are many military men living there, especially in Sevastopol. The operation started with self-organization and all went well.
After the Crimean events, the political situation in the world became very unstable. What did the Americans want to show when they were regrouping their ships?
The Americans finish building their missile defense system. They already cover a large Russian territory with their missile defense system, except for a few areas, where Russian strategic nuclear forces are based. With the European part of the missile defense system, they can reach Russia right up to the Urals. Even in the boost phase of our ballistic missiles they will be able to intercept them. Yet, they still can not reach the territory behind the Urals.
The Americans were looking forward to the moment when they could deploy their Aegis system vessels in the Black Sea basin. Of course, they wanted to install their radars and interceptors on the Crimean peninsula as well. They were planning to establish constant military presence on the Crimean Peninsula.
The Americans were doing their best to set Kiev and Moscow apart for good. I believe that they intended to conduct a referendum on Crimea’s independence. They would have definitely supported it by installing their puppet government in the region.
Do you think that the use of nuclear weapons is possible today?
During the Crimean events, Russia did not set its nuclear forces on a high degree of readiness. We held drills and exercises, where the level of readiness is always the highest. Officially, there was no such order, but the West saw the seriousness of our intentions in pursuing our interests.
The West wanted to flex its muscles to Russia, but Russia flexed her muscles to the West. Power curbs insolence well, as insolence excludes negotiations.
I do not believe in a nuclear conflict at the moment. No matter how strong and large the US missile defense system might be, Russian nuclear warheads will reach the territory of the United States. Of course, Russia would suffer more should a nuclear war start, because Russia does not have missile defense system per se. If they launch nuclear warheads at Russia – practically all of them will land on the Russian territory. Yet, I do not believe that the Russia and American leaderships will step of the path of mutual destruction.
The Americans have been taking advantage of Russia’s military reforms of recent decades. Those reforms were all about disarmament. Looking at our military-technical retreat, of course, the opposing party is obliged to go on offensive, which they did. They have been strengthening and enhancing their defense. The USA has had the largest defense budget in history during the recent years – it equals the military spending of all other countries.
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Posted: 25 Mar 2015 05:54 AM PDT


After the Germanwings’ A320 crash in the French Alps some crews of the low-cost carrier have refused to fly, citing “personal reasons.” The airline’s spokesman insists the problem has nothing to do with the technical condition of its planes.
Germanwings had to cancel several flights Tuesday because crews refused to fly, having learned that the crashed Flight 9525 had been grounded the day before it crashed.
Lufthansa, Germany’s national flag carrier and the owner of Germanwings, has refused to confirm there is any connection between the canceled flights and repairs of the ill-fated A320.
The pilots and crewmembers who refused to fly did so because they were in “deep distress” over the crash that claimed 150 lives, a Lufthansa spokeswoman said.
“Some have refused their service for personal reasons, but not out of concern that something there is out of order,’ the spokeswoman told the dpa news agency.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said he understood the concerns of the crewmembers.
“One must not forget: many of our Germanwings crews have known crewmembers who were onboard the crashed plane,” Spohr said, Deutsche Welle reported.
“It is now more important to ensure psychological assistance if needed. And we will get back to a full flight operation as soon as possible then. But for me, this is rather secondary now,” he said.
The repairs of the nose-wheel landing doors of the doomed plane on Monday lasted one hour, and the aircraft made a number of flights after the repair was carried out.
“The repair was purely to fix a noise that the door was making, and the aircraft was flying again from 10am Monday,” Germanwings’ spokesman said, the International Business Times reported.
Germanwings reportedly canceled seven flights to various destinations from Dusseldorf, and three flights from Stuttgart.
Der Spiegel reported that the canceled flights were to Madrid, Stockholm and London.
The Daily Mail reported that a Lufthansa A321 plane, a larger version of the A320, experienced similar problems with sudden loss of height last year while flying over Spain with 109 passengers onboard.
In November, the A321 unexpectedly lost a whole kilometer of height before the pilots managed to regain control of the aircraft.
The Germanwings A320, carrying 150 people, crashed on its way from Barcelona to Dusseldorf on Tuesday.
“There is some information that is starting to surface on the web that seems to indicate that the plane initially had a very high descent rate from its cruising level,” Marin Medic, a pilot who flies Airbus A320s, told RT. “Meaning that it started descending very rapidly, very quickly in a short period of time, which could be indicative of a pressurization problem or a complete loss of pressurization, in which case the pilots would attempt to get the plane down to a breathable altitude as soon as possible, but so far that’s really all we know.”
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Posted: 25 Mar 2015 05:14 AM PDT
US Air Force shows a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.
The United States has test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from a facility in California in a move to relay a message of nuclear capability to the world.
The US Air Force fired the unarmed Minuteman III missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Monday, according to a statement by the Air Force.
The test-launch program “demonstrates the operational credibility of the Minuteman III and ensures the United States’ ability to maintain a strong, credible nuclear deterrent as a key element of US national security and the security of US allies and partners,” read the statement.
“With these launches, we not only verify our processes and the ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) weapon system, we provide a visual to the world that the Minuteman III is capable of striking pretty much anywhere with extreme precision,” Lt. Col Tytonia Moore said.
The California facility has conducted multiple missile tests over the years, most recently in September 2014.
The latest was tested along with massive NATO war games across Eastern Europe as the alliance plans to expand its military presence in the region amid the conflict in Ukraine.
In 2014, NATO forces held some 200 military exercises with the alliance’s General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg having promised that such drills would continue.
The US and NATO war games have been conducted amid tensions between the US and Russia over the Ukraine crisis.
Western governments accuse Russia of destabilizing Ukraine by supporting pro-Russian forces there. Moscow, however, denies the allegation.
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Posted: 25 Mar 2015 04:28 AM PDT


The Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reporting today that dispatches from the Northern Fleet (NF) appear to show that yesterdays downing of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 in southern France yesterday was the “direct result” of a failed US Air Force test of its High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) attempting to shoot down an ICBM reentry vehicle, but which, instead, destroyed this civilian airliner killing all 150 aboard.
According to this MoD report, the Northern Fleet, which is already on full combat alert, was alerted to this incident yesterday by the Severomorsk submarine chaser, currently operating in the Mediterranean, who reported that widespread atmospheric electrical anomalies over southern France, western Italy and southwestern Switzerland were being detected. The area where these detections were made by the Severomorsk, this report notes, also happens to be the combat operational area of the US Air Forces 510th Fighter Squadron operating out of the Aviano Air Base in Italy.
Curiously, this MoD further notes, these anomalies occurring in the 510th Fighter Squadron’s combat operating area of southern France yesterday came within the same time frame that British civilian radar systems went black; which was further confirmed by a Flight Emergencies posting stating: “Doing a bit of spotting at MAN, I look up and see an A380 passing overhead just past the BA, but nothing on radar? Hm”
This MoD report clarifies that US-UK-EU radar systems frequently go black upon the takeoff/landings of B1 bombers, and which in yesterday’s case, where this incident was reported in Manchester (MAN), it likely coincided with the deployment of a British B-1 Lancer Bomber, some of which are able to utilize the US Air Forces High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System too.
The MoD further notes that the US-UK-EU military structure frequently endangers civilian flights with their war games over the continent, such as last year when about 50 planes temporarily disappeared from radars in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia between 5 June and 10 June. Slovak air traffic services in their statement about this radar blackout admitted at the time: “The disappearance of objects on radar screens was connected with a planned military exercise which took place in various parts of Europe…whose goal was the interruption of radio communication frequencies. This activity also caused the temporary disappearance of several targets on the radar display, while in the meantime the planes were in radio contact with air traffic controllers and continued in their flight normally.”
And to how dangerous these Western war games can be to civilian airliners, this report continues, was evidenced on 3 March when, in an eerie pre-simulation to the demise yesterday of Germanwings Flight 9525, the US Air Force, while preparing for yesterday’s failed test over southern France, Lufthansa Flight LH1172, an Airbus A321 operating at a normal flight altitude, plummeted out of the sky in minutes, and as evidenced by its radar charts.


To the explanation of Lufthansa Flight LH1172 plummeting towards earth in southern France barely a fortnight ago, we can further read from the Airliner Reporter article titled Catching a Lufthansa Airbus A321’s Rapid Descent Live which, in part, says:
“There were a few moments where I thought I may have been watching a crash of some sort occur in real-time, from thousands of miles away. But thankfully, the pilots were just quick acting, and diverted to a nearby airport.
Lufthansa confirmed to AirlineReporter.com that LH1172 had 151 passengers on board and the captain decided to stopover in Nantes (NTE), France, “due to a medical case (sick passenger).” They confirmed that there was no emergency requested and that the aircraft landed safely.”
Unlike Lufthansa Flight LH1172 before it, however, this MoD report continues, Germanwings Flight 9525, yesterday, wasn’t able to recover from its rapid descent…instead it was obliterated in tens-of-thousands of pieces of metal and human flesh upon the side of a mountain in southern France.
To what caused Germanwings Flight 9525 to be so thoroughly destroyed, this report says, was first evidenced on 3 February when a US Air Force test of their High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System targeting one of their older weather system satellites completed obliterated it by heating it from within causing to it explode while in orbit.
However, MoD experts in this report say, chemical laser systems, such as the US Air Forces High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System which brought down Germanwings Flight 9525, and nearly crashed Lufthansa Flight LH1172, are notoriously known for being extremely difficult to aim at long range targets as their “effects” tend to spread throughout the atmosphere affecting anything and everything in their path.
And to the exact scenario causing the destruction of Germanwings Flight 9525 yesterday, these MoD experts continue, was a combined Western alliance attempt to target a “test re-entry vehicle” simulating a Federation nuclear warhead attack upon them yesterday.
The specific “test re-entry vehicle” used in this failed US missile test, this report says, was launched the day before on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired early Monday from a US Air Force facility in California, and which the Obama regime stated was a “message to the world about Washington’s nuclear capabilities”.


This “message to the world”, however, the MoD in their report state, was, instead, aimed directly at the Federation for their crippling of the USS Theodore Roosevelt using the superior “magrav” technology, and that aside from previously destroying this aircraft carrier in a war game a few weeks ago, likewise disabled the USS Donald Cook in the Black Sea last year.
Sadly, this report grimly states, of the nearly 37 NATO aircraft taking part in this US missile test yesterday,just a single Italian military jet switched its transponder to the emergency code of #7700 upon seeing Germanwings Flight 9525 plummet towards the ground.
And as many German pilots are refusing to fly today because of these US war game actions against the Federation, this report concludes, the likelihood of the Western people being told the truth about happened to Germanwings Flight 9525 is about the same as their being told the truth about Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was proved by satellite photos to have been shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet, is about the same…Zero.
And to if the Western peoples even want to know the truth of the countless lives being destroyed on their military leaders alter of war? No one really knows the answer anymore.
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Posted: 25 Mar 2015 04:07 AM PDT


Jupiter’s large orbital journey across the early solar system may have cleared the way for the oddball arrangement of our planetary system, scientists say, even to the point of destroying burgeoning young planets.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology created a model for the formation of Jupiter and Saturn, dubbed ‘Grand Tack,’ which shows Jupiter’s migration towards the sun, the area of the inner solar system, where planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars exist until Saturn is formed. Saturn’s formation caused Jupiter to reverse course and migrate outward to its current orbit.
In other exoplanet systems, there is generally evidence of super-Earths that have formed, which are planets 10 times the mass of Earth.
“[Those planets] tend to have very thick and massive atmospheres with pressures that exceed that of the Earth by factors of hundreds, if not thousands,” lead study author Konstanti Batygin, a planetary scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, told Space.com.
These super-Earths are conspicuously absent in our solar system, so researchers think they may have existed in the inner solar system before Jupiter’s migration. They theorize that as Jupiter moved inward and then outward, its gravitational pull would have set off a series of collisions that smashed the newborn planets to pieces.
“It’s the same thing we worry about if satellites were to be destroyed in low-Earth orbit,” co-author Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. “Their fragments would start smashing into other satellites and you’d risk a chain reaction of collisions. Our work indicates that Jupiter would have created just such a collisional cascade in the inner solar system.”
Scientists say the resulting debris would have mostly spiraled into the sun and caused a second generation of inner planets to form later from the depleted material. This could explain why Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are younger than our outer solar system planets, with smaller and with thinner atmospheres.
“While Earth-mass planets may indeed be plentiful in the galaxy, truly Earth-like planets, with low atmospheric pressure and temperatures on the surfaces, are likely an exception to the rule,” said Batygin.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 08:28