Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Saturday 11 April 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 10 Apr 2015 03:58 PM PDT

Patriot groups across the country are preparing to launch a ‘Counter Jade Helm’ operation to keep tabs on a controversial U.S. military exercise that some fear is part of preparations to train troops for civil unrest and martial law.
Jade Helm, a “realistic” military training exercise involving nine states, which will involve the Green Berets, Navy Seals, and the 82nd Airborne Division and is set to take place from July 15-Sepember 15, has prompted concerns after Texas and Utah were labeled “hostile” territory in documents related to the exercise.
Although the U.S. Army insists the drill is designed to prepare troops for combat abroad, concerns have been raised that the exercise is part of a history of the military readying for domestic disorder.
During the drill, soldiers will operate”undetected amongst civilian populations,” to see if they can infiltrate without being noticed. Residents will be encouraged to report “suspicious activity” during the exercise.
In response, patriot groups led by Pete Lanteri, former president of Icon Tactical Industries, will monitor the exercises.
A Facebook page for the initiative promises to, “observe the attempted infiltration of our towns during Operation Jade Helm with self sufficient teams in the field conducting counter surveillance.”
“Our main focus right now is on gathering intel on when and where the military will be infiltrating SOF teams for Operation Jade Helm,” writes Lanteri. “We have the Texas locations. We need verified info on South Cali and Utah locations. Arizona looks like it will only be on 1 military installation. Once we gather that intel and the field teams are informed then we will start posting information on how to go about locating SOF teams in public. Looking for certain mannerisms, etc. But right now we are focused on locations and dates!!”
Over 2,000 people have followed the page so far, with many posting updates about Jade Helm, including speculation that Colorado has told the Army it will refuse to allow state or city property to be used for the drill.
Other similar initiatives, named ‘Operation Tyranny Response’ And ‘Operation Homeland Hawkeye’, have also been launched in response to Jade Helm.
A post attributed to Navy veteran Geoff Ross asserts that he has arranged for 25 retired Navy SEAL, DELTA and Rangers to travel to Washington DC to conduct exercises similar to those described in the Jade Helm documents.
“They will wander around and be tourists. They may pop in and visit a few Congressman or maybe they won’t. Or, maybe they will. The 1st Amendment is about to be exercised. Body cams in place. They practice we practice. We all practice. They visit us. We visit them,” writes Ross.
It is not yet known whether the Oathkeepers organization will take part in any of these campaigns. The Oathkeepers were present during the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri last year and protected numerous businesses from being targeted by looters.
Mainstream media coverage of Jade Helm has poured scorn on concerns about the exercise and merely regurgitated Army talking points that the drill is purely designed to prepare troops for overseas combat.
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Posted: 10 Apr 2015 03:37 PM PDT

A high-ranking scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has predicted that human beings will find signs of alien life by 2025.
“I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years,” The Independent quoted NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan as saying on Wednesday.
According to NASA, such discoveries may even occur in our own solar system.
“We know where to look. We know how to look,” added Stofan during a panel discussion focused on the agency’s efforts in the search for habitable worlds and alien life on Tuesday.
“In most cases we have the technology, and we’re on a path to implementing it. And so I think we’re definitely on the road.”
Associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld, who was also present at the panel, said that life will be found in the near future in our own solar system and other systems.
“I think we’re one generation away in our solar system, whether it’s on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star,” said Grunsfeld.
Recent NASA discoveries
Liquid water has been discovered underneath the frozen surfaces of the Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, and also on the Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
In the ancient past, Mars’s surface was covered with vast oceans, and dark streaks seen today on its surface may have been caused by the flow of salty water.
On the planet’s surface, NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered carbon-containing organic molecules and “fixed” nitrogen, which are the basic ingredients required for similar life to that on Earth.
Also, based on NASA’s Kepler space telescope’s observations, suggestions have been made that almost every star in the sky hosts planets which may be habitable.
“Once we get out beyond Mars, the likelihood that it’s similar to Earth because we share that material gets very, very low,” Grunsfeld said. “And I think that’s where it starts getting exceptionally exciting.”
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Posted: 10 Apr 2015 03:12 PM PDT

The communist Syria party mislead Greeks to falsely believe that Greece will exit the EU if elected but now, only 3 months later after they were elected into office, Syriza Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says his government’s main goal is to remain in the Eurozone and find an all-European solution to the country’s financial problems, Alexis Tsipras said Thursday.
Speculations about Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone monetary union started back in 2012 amid the country’s financial crisis. As Greek financial problems persisted and even intensified, in 2015 discussions about Greece’s exit from the eurozone surfaced again.
However, during his speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Tsipras assured that Greece wants to remain in the Eurozone.
“Our government’s goal is that Greece remains in the Eurozone and we are searching for an all-European solution for this task.”
Greece’s anti-austerity Syriza party, headed by Tsipras, came to power in January with a pledge to revise the country’s bailout terms dictated by the troika of international creditors, comprising the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The bailout standoff has created great uncertainty regarding Greece’s future in the eurozone.
Greece’s total debt to the troika of international creditors currently stands at around $270 billion.
In February, the country’s new left-wing government promised to pursue economic reforms after Athens and eurozone finance ministers agreed to extend the bailout deal until late June 2015.
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Posted: 10 Apr 2015 02:47 PM PDT
A German-made Dolphin-class submarine in the Mediterranean port city of Haifa.
The German Federal Security Council has allowed the government to deliver another submarine to the Tel Aviv regime.
The German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Friday that the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel will export the fifth of six promised Dolphin-class submarines to Israel after the council expressed its consent.
The German company ThyssenKrupp had already delivered the fourth submarine to the Israeli regime in September 2014.
The deliveries have greatly infuriated many people in the European country as one third of the $530-million submarines contract between Berlin and Tel Aviv has been set to be covered by German taxpayers.
Merkel’s administration has also come under fire for providing Israel with Dolphin-class submarines because they are capable of being equipped with nuclear cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, a military expert warned Berlin of the consequences of the submarines delivery, saying that the vessels, when in the hands of the Israeli regime, will turn into a threat to the security of the region and the world.
“These are new batch of submarines that Israel is receiving which have a markedly increased capability on what they’d had previously in terms of range, covertness and ability to reach different parts of the world than they had previously been able to do,” Peter Roberts, an expert in sea power and naval weapons systems at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told Russia-based Sputnik news agency.
Under Germany’s Military Weapons Control Act and the Export Act, the country’s Federal Security Council must approve of any military deal between Berlin and foreign states.
Israel is widely believed to be the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East and has so far blatantly violated the international rules regarding nuclear non-proliferation.
Back in December 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution urging Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and put its nuclear facilities under the safeguard of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
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Posted: 10 Apr 2015 02:11 PM PDT

A Chinese supercomputer ranked fastest in the world four years running could soon slip from that top spot: Intel, the US-based microprocessor maker, says it’s been blocked by the US government from selling chips to China.
Representatives for Intel Corp. confirmed to the Wall Street Journal this week that it’s stopped shipping microprocessor chips to Chinese customers after the US Department of Commerce announced recently with little fanfare that its begun restricting exports to certain entities there over national security concerns. According to the Commerce Dept., the chips are powering high-speed supercomputers being used to conduct nuclear research on behalf of the Chinese government.
A Commerce Dept. committee added the names of four Beijing-linked entities to its block list in February, the Journal first reported on Thursday this week, all believed to be “involved in activities contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”
The group determined that the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), the National Supercomputing Center in Changsha (NSCC–CS), National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou (NSCC–GZ) and the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin (NSCC–TJ), all located in the People’s Republic of China, should be shunned because they’ve been ordering chips from Intel to build supercomputers “believed to be used in nuclear explosive activities,” according to the Commerce Dept.
Specifically, the notice says that “NUDT has used US-origin multicores, boards and processors to produce the TianHe-A and TianHe-2 supercomputers located at the National Supercomputer Centers in Changsha, Guangzhou and Tianjin.” The Tihane-2 was named in 2014 as the world’s top supercomputer for the fourth consecutive year by TOP500 project, a group that has been rating high-speed machines since the early 90s.
Once an entity is added to Commerce Dept.’s “Entity List,” American firms must obtain a specialized export license to send products there, the Journal reported. In the Feb. notice published in the Federal Register, the department acknowledged that these licenses are “usually subject to a policy of denial.”
Indeed, Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told reporters this week that his company was notified by the Commerce Dept. last August and told that it would soon need an export license to continue shipping powerful Xeon processors to China.
“We were selling them standard off-the-shelf parts” before being warned of the impending Commerce Dept. restrictions, he told Customs Today. “Once we got the letter, we stopped shipment of parts.”
“Intel complied with the notification and applied for the license, which was denied,” Mulloy said in a statement this week. “We are in compliance with the US law.”
Now without the addition of Intel-made components, the maintainers of the world’s fastest supercomputer will have to look elsewhere to hold onto its ranking. The Top500 project says the Tianhe-2 “has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores.” The BBC reported that the machine uses that power to crunch numbers at a speed of 33 petaflops – or roughly 33 quadrillion calculations per second.
But according to some experts, blocking shipments of US chips to China may only further enable foreign companies to ramp up their own research efforts.
“The Chinese will be more incentivized to develop their own technology, and US manufacturers will be seen as less reliable and potentially not able to satisfy foreign orders,” Horst Simon, deputy director of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told the Journal.
“China has been pushing the development of its own chip industry, and this is likely to accelerate their effort,” Simon told the China Daily. “With the exception of the Intel chips, the rest of the Tianhe-2’s technology was developed domestically.”
The Commerce Dept. declined to comment for the Journal’s report Thursday, and PC World said that an employee of the National Supercomputing Center of Guangzhou said they were “not very clear” on the situation.
“Even if they did stop selling, there’s nothing to prevent China from getting Intel chips or anybody’s chips from a number of alternative sources,” Jim McGregor, an industry analyst with Tirias Research in Mesa, Arizona, told Customs Today. “To keep individual components like a processor out of somebody’s hands is almost impossible in today’s market.”
China had planned to upgrade its machine later in 2015, the BBC reported, to give it a speed of 110 petaflops. Meanwhile, Intel has signed a $200 million deal with the US government to build the Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Once completed, that machine will have a peak performance speed of 180 petaflops, according to the BBC – or around six times faster than the Tianhe-2’s current speed.
When the Top500 project released its last annual supercomputer rankings in November 2014, the US-developed Titan placed second, followed by IBM’s Sequoia.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 14:18