Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday 2 April 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 02 Apr 2015 01:45 AM PDT
Saudi King Salman attends the Arab League summit in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on March 28, 2015.
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman says the ongoing military invasion of Yemen by his country will continue until its goals are achieved.
He made the comments on Saturday at the opening session of an Arab summit held in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.
The Saudi king claimed that the goal of the Saudi air raids is to bring “security” to the people in Yemen.
The campaign “will continue until it achieves its goals for the Yemeni people to enjoy security,” he said.
Also on Saturday, Persian Gulf Arab diplomatic officials said the military campaign, which started on March 26, could last up to six months.
Riyadh resorted to the air raids in a bid to restore power to fugitive Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a close ally of the Saudi regime. Nearly 40 civilians have so far been killed in the airstrikes.
Hadi stepped down in January and refused to reconsider the decision despite calls by Ansarullah revolutionaries. The Yemeni parliament did not approve his resignation back then.
Gradually, as the Yemeni government failed to provide security and properly run the affairs of the country, the Ansarullah fighters started to take control of state matters to contain corruption and terror.
The Ansarullah fighters took control of the Yemeni capital in September 2014 and are currently moving southward.
The fugitive president fled Aden to the Saudi capital city of Riyadh after Ansarullah revolutionaries advanced toward Aden, where he had sought to set up a rival power base and where he withdrew his resignation.
On Saturday, Hadi’s Foreign Minister Riyadh Yassin said the fugitive leader will not go back to his country “for now.”
“He (Hadi) will return to Aden once the chaos there comes under control,” Yassin added.
The Riyadh regime’s blatant violation of Yemen’s sovereignty comes against a backdrop of total silence on the part of international bodies, especially the UN.
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Posted: 02 Apr 2015 12:51 AM PDT

While the media are obsessively talking about Andreas Lubitz, the psychopathic Germanwings co-pilot accused of deliberately crashing flight 4U9525, the man who tried save the passengers and crew seems to be left in the shadows. So what do we know about him?
“Open the damn door! For God’s sake, open the door!” These were the last words of captain Patrick Sondheimer, desperately pleading for his silent co-pilot to let him return to the cockpit.
His numerous appeals were in vain. Lubitz didn’t react at all, and then the captain is heard grabbing an ax and trying to smash the door.
His words are clearly heard on black box recordings, the transcript of which was published in Germany’s Bild newspaper.
The plane was descending for about 10 minutes. This apparently seemed an eternity to Sondheimer, but wasn’t enough time to break “the damn door” and to save the crew and passengers.
Sondheimer, 34, previously captained long-haul flights for Lufthansa and another of its subsidiaries, Condor, for 10 years. He had more than 6,000 flying hours on A320 aircraft.
In May 2014, the married father-of-two decided to join Germanwings. With the budget carrier he was able to fly shorter journeys so he could spend more time with his family, German RP Online website reported.
Pastor Elke Bonn, head of the Catholic kindergarten in Dusseldorf attended by his two young children – a three-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter – described Sondheimer as “an outgoing, enthusiastic and helpful man who radiated happiness.”
“We sang and prayed and expressed our sadness before we stood before the cross with a great light dedicated to him. It is very, very difficult for his family to come to terms with the situation,” Father Karl-Heinz Sulzenfuss, who led the memorial service, said.
Sondheimer’s grandmother, Marianne, told the Mirror that her grandson had dreamed of becoming a pilot as a young boy.
“My grandson is dead and all because of an idiot who did this to his whole flight and killed so many people,” she said. “I just cannot understand it. How could [Lubitz] do this?”
A former colleague described Sondheimer as “one of our best pilots.”
“He was very reliable, I am 100 percent convinced that he did all that was possible [to save people on board].”
Those sympathetic to the brave captain, took to social media, calling to remember a hero (Sondheimer) rather than a villain (Lubitz).
“Sad that the madman Andreas Lubitz will remembered for the crash, while the heroic name of Captain Patrick Sonderheimer will be forgotten,” wrote @Phillygene1 user.
User @andreastemplin laments that “the news outlets focus on the co-pilot [Lubitz],” but not on the captain whose last attempt in his life was to save his fellow crew members and passengers on the fatal flight.
Facebook users have created several groups where they pay tribute to the late captain.
“I want everyone to know the HERO! And in memory of all those lost and the family’s! Heaven has gained 150 angels! WE love you!!!!”said a post in one of the groups.
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Posted: 01 Apr 2015 04:06 AM PDT

Russian geopolitical analyst Konstantin Sivkov has called for Moscow to launch a nuclear attack on Yellowstone National Park and the San Andreas fault line, noting that the devastating consequences would ‘disappear’ the United States as a country.
Sivkov made the comments in a piece for Russian trade newspaper VPK News, which were translated by the Sydney Morning Herald.
Arguing that NATO aggression against Russia required the “complete destruction of the enemy,” Sivkov went on to depict a chilling scenario.
“Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. There are signs of growing activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States – a country just disappears,” he said.
A Yellowstone supervolcano eruption would kill millions of people in the initial blast and bury much of the United States in volcanic ash. According to some experts, it could cause the end of the world. The last time a supervolcano exploded in Siberia, 85 per cent of all land species and 95 per cent of all ocean dwellers were completely wiped out.
In 2013 it was revealed that the magma below Yellowstone was two and a half times larger than previously thought, giving the park’s supervolcano the potential to cause an eruption 2,000 times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. Some experts say the caldera is overdue to erupt.
Sivkov also said that while Russia’s geography protected it from the threat posed by tsunamis, one could be triggered in the United States with an attack on the San Andreas fault.
“Another vulnerable area of the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas fault – 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates … a detonation of a nuclear weapon there can trigger catastrophic events like a coast-scale tsunami which can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States,” he wrote.
Sections of the San Andreas fault are overdue for major earthquake activity. “Researchers found that three sections of the San Andreas Fault system in Northern California — Hayward, Rodgers Creek and Green Valley — are either near or past their average recurrence interval and have accumulated sufficient strain to trigger earthquakes of magnitude 6.8 or greater,” reports CBS News.
Fearing that the United States plans to “destroy Russia,” Sivkov says that Moscow is in a much worse position than it was 50 years ago because it has far fewer allies and cannot compete against the military might of NATO and its allies.
While it would be unthinkable for anyone inside the Kremlin to take Sivkov’s comments seriously, his rhetoric illustrates how fraught tensions are between Moscow and Washington.
Last month, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander in Europe, warned that the threat of a conflict with Russia, “represents an existential threat to our whole being”.
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Posted: 01 Apr 2015 03:53 AM PDT

The head of the Russian NGO that specializes in the investigation of Stalinist purges has voiced concern over the growing popularity of the late Soviet dictator, as demonstrated by public opinion polls.
“This is a very troubling signal. And it is a testimony not even of the citizens’ attitude to Stalin, but rather of the relations between the state and a person. Stalin is perceived as a symbol of a powerful and potent state. The fact that Stalin and his policies were inhumane becomes of secondary importance,” the head of Memorial, Arseny Roginsky, said in comments to Interfax.
The activist added that he saw this as a very dangerous tendency.
Roginsky’s March statement was drawn by the release of the latest research on the attitude to Stalin in the Russian community, conducted by the independent pollster Levada Center in late March this year. According to the survey, the share of those who confessed their respect to Stalin increased from 23 percent in 2010 to 30 percent this year. The number of those who described their attitude as “fascination” and “sympathy” remained unchanged at 2 and 7 percent respectively.
When pollsters asked the public if they would like a monument to Joseph Stalin to be erected in Russia for the 70th anniversary of the victory in WWII, 37 percent said they had a positive attitude to the idea (compared to 24 percent in 2010) and 27 percent said they did not like it (36 percent in 2010).
In late February this year, Memorial criticized a proposal to erect a monument to Stalin in Moscow and to rename the city of Volgograd as Stalingrad.
“No city can be named after a man who has been an organizer, initiator and perpetrator of a mass terror that exterminated Russian peasants in the years of collectivization, and by whose orders over 700,000 people were executed in 1937 and 1938 alone,” Roginsky said back then. “In other words, we cannot name a city after a criminal.”
The controversy surrounding Stalin’s name and his role in Russian history is a popular topic and has been used by various political forces in Russia in recent years. In 2013, leftist parties proposed renaming the city of Volgograd back to Stalingrad, claiming that this was the name used by the city’s defenders during the war and that Stalingrad is better-known around the world.
However, both the general public and the Russian officials rejected the idea. Polls showed that 60 percent of Russians were against the renaming. President Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said in an interview that Kremlin officials had never considered renaming Volgograd to Stalingrad and did not plan to put this issue on the agenda in the future.
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Posted: 01 Apr 2015 03:17 AM PDT
Composite image showing the relationship between brain surface expansion and age in children 3-20 years.
Bigger brains and better cognitive skills in children are linked to higher family income and education, a research reveals.
The study, which was carried out by a group of researchers from the Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and Columbia University Medical Center, was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience on March 30.
“We found that the relationship between brain (structure) and family income impacted kids’ cognitive functioning,” AFP quoted study co-author Elizabeth Sowell of the University of Southern California as saying.
The study was carried out by testing 1,099 developing boys and girls aged three to 20, from variable population groups.
The team compared the education and incomes of the participants’ parents to the kids’ brain surface area and cognitive test results.
“It seems reasonable to speculate that resources afforded by the more affluent (nutrition, child care, schools, etc.) help ‘wire’ the brain through development,” she said.
“While in no way implying that a child’s socioeconomic circumstances lead to immutable changes in brain development or cognition, our data suggest that wider access to resources likely afforded by the more affluent may lead to differences in a child’s brain structure,” Sowell added.
The study emphasized that with better school lunches and motivated teaching and community programs the gap could be breached.
“The most important point we want to convey… is not ‘if you are poor, your brain will be smaller, and there is nothing that can be done about it.’ That is absolutely not the message!” she added.
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Posted: 01 Apr 2015 02:48 AM PDT
Members of the media got an up-close look at LDSD flight-test vehicles currently in preparation in the clean room at NASA-JPL on March 31.
Thought they were just the stuff of science fiction movies? Not if NASA has anything to say about it. Agency researchers are developing a spacecraft that looks just like a flying saucer, with the hopes of helping a manned mission to Mars one day land softly on the Red Planet.
Mars has a tricky “in-between” environment, according to NASA. Unlike Earth, which has a dense atmosphere, or the moon, which has no atmosphere at all, Mars has too much atmosphere to allow heavy payloads to land with rockets alone, but too little atmosphere to make parachutes effective at slowing down spacecraft as they approach the ground.
As means to fix the problem, NASA on Tuesday showed off the fruits of its Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program: essentially a combination balloon and flying saucer.
The craft, which is being developed in six- and eight-meter versions, will create friction as it spins, slowing a payload down enough for the 30.5 meter parachute to allow for a reasonable landing. The saucer is also equipped with a rocket to help in the process.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California put the saucer on a spin table to ensure it’s balanced properly for flight.
In June, it’ll be launched into near-space from the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii.
The drag system could be put into practice as early as 2020.
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Posted: 01 Apr 2015 02:08 AM PDT

Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler turned governor of Minnesota, steps into the ring with politicians, journalists and opinion makers for lively debates on his new weekly current affairs program on RT America.
“Off the Grid,” a talk show launched by Ventura last year on Larry King’s Ora TV internet network, will join RT’s Friday evening television line-up beginning this Friday, April 3.
In a statement released by RT, Ventura said the program will showcase “uncensored discussions on the critical issues facing America today.”
“Independent viewpoints such as my own are few and far between,” Ventura said in a statement. “I’m thrilled that my show will be aired on RT America, as well as continuing on Ora TV as my digital home.”
According to an online archive of the show’s past episodes, Ventura’s most-viewed segments since launching last January are an interview with former presidential hopeful Ron Paul, a sit-down with actor William Shatner and a 13-minute monologue on the “life and crimes” of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of the United States.
“‘Off the Grid’” will become yet another platform for independent and alternative viewpoints – something that made our channel popular with American audiences from the start,” said RT editor in chief Margarita Simonyan.
Ventura, 63, has hosted nearly 200 episodes of “Off the Grid” since the show’s kick-off, and prior to that starred for three seasons in the truTV series, “Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura.”
Previously, Ventura served as the 38th governor of Minnesota from 1999 and 2003 after a stint as mayor of Brooklyn Park, MN. His rise to fame started in the 1970s, when Ventura began performing with the World Wrestling Federation. He later starred in the 1987 sci-fi cinema classic “Predator” and has since authored more than half-dozen politically-themed books, including 2011’s “American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us.”
In a statement, RT said that “Off the Grid” will continue to be filmed in “a secret location,” but that its host may appear at the network’s studios for special coverage.
After “Off the Grid” launched on Ora last year, Ventura said in an interview with RT that he had begun filming the show in Mexico, “so that the drones can’t find me.”
“I view the United States, today, much like East Berlin. And I’m off the grid. I’ve tried for 20 years to warn the country about the Democrats and Republicans, and nobody’s listening,” he said.
“Off the Grid” will be the third Ora TV show produced exclusively for RT America. The network currently carries episodes of Larry King Now and Politicking with Larry King, both staring the veteran interviewer and Ora TV co-founder.
Tyrel Ventura, the son of the former governor, currently co-hosts “Watching the Hawks,” a talk show that began airing on RT America in March 2015.
Starting April 3, “Off the Grid” will air Fridays at 6pm EST on RT America, the exclusive worldwide broadcaster for the show. The show will continue to stream online atora.tv and will be available online on rt.com.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 08:57