Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday 2 March 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 01 Mar 2015 02:08 PM PST
Newly sworn-in Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez (R) receives the ceremonial sash from outgoing President Jose Pepe Mujica (2-R) in Montevideo on March 1, 2015.
Uruguay’s president, Jose “Pepe” Mujica, a former guerrilla who lives on a farm and gives most of his salary to charity, is stepping down after five years in office, ending his term as one of the world’s most popular leaders ever.
Mujica, 79, is leaving office with a 65 percent approval rating. He is constitutionally prohibited from serving consecutive terms.
“I became president filled with idealism, but then reality hit,” Mujica said in an interview with a local newspaper earlier this week, according to AFP.
Some call him “the world’s poorest president.” Others the “president every other country would like to have.” But Mujica says “there’s still so much to do” and hopes that the next government, led by Tabare Vazquez (who was elected president for a second time last November) will be “better than mine and will have greater success.”
Mujica said he succeeded in putting Uruguay on the world map. He managed to turn the cattle-ranching country, home to 3,4 million people, into an energy-exporting nation, Brazil being Uruguay’s top export market (followed by China, Argentina, Venezuela and the US.)
Uruguay’s $55 billion economy has grown an average 5.7 percent annually since 2005, according to the World Bank. Uruguay has maintained its decreasing trend in public debt-to-GDP ratio – from 100 percent in 2003 to 60 percent by 2014. It has also managed to decrease the cost of its debt, and reduce dollarization – from 80 percent in 2002 to 50 percent in 2014.
“We’ve had positive years for equality. Ten years ago, about 39 percent of Uruguayans lived below the poverty line; we’ve brought that down to under 11 percent and we’ve reduced extreme poverty from 5 percent to only 0.5 percent,” Mujica told the Guardian in November.
After Latin America’s anti-drug war proved a failure, the South American country became the first in the world to fully legalize marijuana, with Mujica arguing that drug trafficking is in fact more dangerous than marijuana itself.
One of the most progressive leaders in Latin America. Muijica also legalized abortion and same-sex marriage and agreed to take in detainees once held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay. Six former US detainees, who were never charged with a crime, came to Uruguay in December as refugees. The six included four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian. Although they were cleared for release back in 2009, the US was not able to discharge them until Uruguayan President offered to receive them.
Mujica, a former leftist Tupamaro guerrilla leader, spent 13 years in jail during the years of Uruguay’s military dictatorship. He survived torture and endless months of solitary confinement. Majica said he never regretted his time in jail, which he believes helped shape his character.
Mujica’s kindness speaks volumes: He refused to move to Uruguay’s luxurious presidential mansion to live in a farm outside Montevideo with his wife and a three-legged dog named Manuela. Pepe gives away about 90 percent of his salary to charity, saying he simply doesn’t need it. He drives an 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.
Last year, Mujica turned down a $1 million offer from an Arab sheik who offered to buy his blue car. Pepe refused to sell the vehicle, saying it would offend “all those friends who pooled together to buy it for us.”
In January, a young Uruguayan man posted a message on his Facebook page recounting how Mujica and his wife picked him up while he was hitchhiking.
“On Monday, I was looking for a ride from Conchilla and guess who picked me up on the road?” Gerhald Acosta wrote on his Facebook post January 7. “They were the only ones who would stop!”
“When I got out, I thanked them profusely because not everyone helps someone out on the road, and much less a president,” the man told Uruguay’s El Observador newspaper.
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Posted: 01 Mar 2015 01:59 PM PST


Sierra Leone’s vice president has voluntarily quarantined himself after one of his security guards died from Ebola.
Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana on Sunday decided to put himself in quarantine for 21 days following the death of one of his security personnel last Tuesday.
It is the first time a high-ranking official is quarantined for fear of spreading the epidemic that according to the most recent figures released by the World Health Organization (WHO) has claimed 9,600 lives in the world.
“This virus has affected thousands of our people and has nearly brought our country to its knees,” said Sam-Sumana in a statement, adding, “We all have a collective responsibility to break the chains of transmission by isolating the sick and reporting all known contacts, by not touching the dead…. We cannot be complacent. We must work together as a nation to end Ebola now.”
In reaction to the emergence of new cases of Ebola in recent weeks, Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma, on Saturday reinstated travel restrictions he recently lifted in order to stimulate economic activity and relax citizens.
According to the WHO, 23,800 confirmed cases mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have been reported since Ebola broke out 14 months ago.
Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known to man, is spread only through direct contact with the body fluids of an infected person. Insuring safe burials of the highly infectious bodies of those who die from the virus has been a main concern in encountering the crisis.
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Posted: 01 Mar 2015 01:44 PM PST


Wants To Cross Check Websites Against Debunking Sites Such As Snopes.com
Search Engine giant Google, the major driver of traffic to the majority of media portals is moving to change the way it ranks websites, declaring that it intends to use known partisan debunking outlets to determine the “truthfulness” of content.
Currently, Google rankings are determined by the number of incoming links to a web page, meaning that if a story becomes popular it can be driven to the top of search results, and by viewed by millions of people.
However, this is a little too democratic for the liking of some, who only like to get their “facts” from pre-approved sources.
The proposed solution, according to a Google funded research team is to compute a “Knowledge-Based Trust score” for every web page, based on Google’s own “Knowledge Vault”, an automated database that determines “facts the web unanimously agrees on,” according to the New Scientist.
“A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the research team.
In short, any web pages that provide information that contradicts or questions Google’s own established “truth”, will be bumped down the rankings.
In addition, some of those working on “truthfulness” ranking technology have expressed a desire to verify or rebut web pages by cross-referencing them to other sources, such as Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. These websites exist and profit directly from debunking anything and everything. What’s more, they have been previously exposed as highly partisan.
It is a move that will set alarm bells ringing for fans of alternative media websites, such as Infowars, which are regularly attacked by the professional debunking websites merely for questioning official narratives, and popularising underreported information.
Presumably, the meters of truthfulness and trustworthiness ultimately implemented by Google will stem from government accounts and it’s mouthpiece mainstream media reports. The rise of the alternative media has directly correlated with the routine exposure of misinformation, propaganda, and outright lies emanating from these institutions.
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Posted: 01 Mar 2015 01:25 PM PST
This cryo-electron tomography image reveals the internal structure of an ultra-small bacteria cell like never before.
Scientists have taken the first ever extensive microscopy images of ultra-small bacteria, which are so far thought to be the smallest life forms in existence.
The bacteria have an average volume of 0.009 cubic microns (a micron is one millionth of a meter), 150,000 of which could be placed on the tip of a human hair.
Ultra-small bacteria’s presence has been under debate for some twenty years, but until now they lacked a comprehensive electron microscopy and DNA-based description.
The research was carried out by a group of scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, and was published in the February 27 edition of the journal Nature Communications.
“These newly described ultra-small bacteria are an example of a subset of the microbial life on earth that we know almost nothing about,” said the co-corresponding author of the research, Jill Banfield, a senior faculty scientist in the earth sciences division of Berkeley Lab.
The diverse microbes are discovered in groundwater and are believed to be rather common. They are the smallest a cell can be but still harbor sufficient material to sustain life.
“They’re enigmatic. These bacteria are detected in many environments and they probably play important roles in microbial communities and ecosystems. But we don’t yet fully understand what these ultra-small bacteria do,” said Banfield.
The bacterial cells are compromised of densely packed spirals which are thought to be DNA and a low number of ribosomes, and hair-like appendages which could aid the cell to connect with other microbes and obtain required resources.
Their metabolism is stripped down probably making them dependent on other bacteria.
“There isn’t a consensus over how small a free-living organism can be, and what the space optimization strategies may be for a cell at the lower size limit for life. Our research is a significant step in characterizing the size, shape, and internal structure of ultra-small cells,” said the other author of the research Birgit Luef.
The research was carried out by filtering groundwater obtained at Rifle, Colorado, down to 0.2 microns. The remainder was enriched with ultra tiny microbes, which were flash frozen and transported to Berkeley laboratory, where they underwent cryogenic transmission electron microscopy imaging.
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Posted: 01 Mar 2015 01:01 PM PST
A Topol-M missile launcher rolls down Red Square in Moscow.
Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces are ready to react to any nuclear strike even if it is lightning fast, SMF Central Command chief said. A retaliatory strike would take place in all circumstances, “without hesitation,” he added.
“If there’s a challenge to repel a lightning-fast nuclear in any given conditions – it will be done in fixed time, that’s dead true,” the Strategic Missile Forces Central Command’s chief, Major-General Andrey Burbin, told Russian News Service on Saturday.
Russia’s strategic missile forces are positioned geographically in such a way that no global strike can knock them out completely, Burbin said.
In case an order is given to carry out a nuclear strike, Russian nuclear weapons operators will fulfill it, he added.
“There would be no hesitation, the task would be executed,” he said.


The unavoidability of a retaliatory nuclear strike from Russia is also guaranteed by the fully automatic and constantly modernized ‘Perimeter’ system, also known as “Dead hand.”
The system collects data from various sources, such as radioactivity and seismic sensors scattered throughout Russia, by scanning radio frequencies and communication activities.
If pooled data indicates that Russia has suffered a nuclear strike, the system launches special missiles that travel through national airspace, sending launch signals to all surviving strategic nuclear missile complexes. In this case a retaliatory missile strike is launched without human input.
Burbin also told RSN that rearmament of the Strategic Missile Forces is ongoing as planned and by 2020 up to 98 percent of Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces will be armed with brand new weapons.
Nationwide war games of Strategic Nuclear Missile Forces were conducted in February, with 30 missile regiments training in 12 regions of Russia.
Missilemen performed ultimate combat operational readiness, counteraction to subversive groups and perfected defenses against airborne precision weapons.
On any given day, over 6,000 servicemen are maintaining the operational readiness of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 11:50