The European Union Times |
- World would be a better place with Saddam, Gaddafi still in power – Trump
- Deadly Floods force Egyptian governor to resign
- Unprecedented Flooding Has Hit The U.S. Within The Last 30 Days
- Lebanon arrests, interrogates Saudi prince for carrying drugs
- US fears Russian subs near undersea cables may cut off communications
|
Posted: 26 Oct 2015 10:58 AM PDT
 If Middle East strongmen Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were still in this world, it would have been a better place, because what came instead is much worse, US presidential candidate Donald Trump said. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on his State of the Union show whether the world would have been better off with Hussein and Gaddafi still ruling in Iraq and Syria, Trump said “100 percent.” “I mean, look at Libya. Look at Iraq. Iraq used to be no terrorists. [Hussein] would kill the terrorists immediately, which is like now it’s the Harvard of terrorism,” Trump said. “I’m not saying he was a nice guy, he was a horrible guy, but it was a lot better than it is right now. Right now, Iraq is a training ground for terrorists. Right now Libya, nobody even knows Libya, frankly there is no Iraq and there is no Libya. It’s all broken up. They have no control. Nobody knows what’s going on.” Both Hussein and Gaddafi were dictatorial leaders who ruled with a strong hand. Hussein was ousted by a US-led coalition that acted with no mandate on a pretext that he had a clandestine program of weapons of mass destruction. The accusation was later proven to be false. He was tried and executed by the post-invasion authorities. Gaddafi was ousted by a violent uprising propped by a NATO bombing campaign, which hijacked a UN resolution demanding protection of civilians from bombings by Gaddafi forces. NATO instead devastated the Libyan army, allowing the rebels to catch and summarily execute Gaddafi. Both Hussein and Gaddafi committed atrocities against their own people, but now the situation with human rights in Iraq and Libya is “worse than ever,” Trump told CNN. “People are getting their heads chopped off, they’re being drowned. Right now, they are far worse than they were, ever, under Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi,” he said. “Libya is a disaster. Iraq is a disaster. Syria is. The whole Middle East. And it all blew up around [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton and [President] Barack Obama.” Trump, who has been the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for next year’s presidential election, has been losing ground to his rival Ben Carson, who surged past Trump in the early-voting state of Iowa. The latest opinion poll, published Friday by Bloomberg/Des Moines Register, gives 28 percent support for Carson as opposed to 19 percent for Trump for the state’s Republican caucus. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who committed UK’s military support to then-President George W Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, has acknowledged that the current Middle East bloodshed may stem from that decision. He also said that in Iraq, Libya and Syria the West tried different approaches to regime change, and in none of these countries did turn out well. Source           |
|
Posted: 26 Oct 2015 10:53 AM PDT
 A man is seen commuting across the flooded streets of Alexandria on October 25, 2015.State television revealed Sunday that Prime Minister Sherif Ismail accepted the resignation of the governor of Alexandria. Hours before his resignation, Messiri called the situation in Alexandria an “environmental catastrophe,” according to the state-run al-Ahram Arabic news website. His resignation followed calls by critics and activists on the social media for him to step down, further accusing him of failing to renovate the city’s old drainage system. The city of Alexandria was flooded due to heavy rain that hit the city Sunday morning. Heavy rains paralyzed traffic and electricity was out in many districts of the city, causing panic among the citizens of the country’s second largest city. Citizens including business owners reported heavy damage caused by the extreme rainy weather. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi called for an emergency meeting with his cabinet to assess the damage from the floods on Monday. El-Sisi called on the government to provide the care needed to the families affected by the heavy rains. He has also ordered compensation for the families who have lost loved ones to the floods. The floods have sparked outrage among angry citizens against the government arguing that the current military-backed administration has not started to pay enough attention to decades-old problems, and failed to prepare for the rainy season. Alexandria receives heavy rains during this time of year. Last year, floods wreaked havoc in the city for several days. The city, according to government data, has not undergone any infrastructure development projects for the past 15 years. Source      |
|
Posted: 26 Oct 2015 10:46 AM PDT
 Over the past 30 days, major floods have hit the east coast, the west coast and now the middle part of the country. So why is this happening? Why is the U.S. being hit by so many catastrophic weather events all of a sudden? During the past month flooding has caused billions of dollars in damage, and in many areas the clean up is going to take well into next year. Some pundits are blaming El Nino, but others are pointing to other potential reasons for why this may be happening. Let’s start by taking a look at some of the biggest flood events that have happened over the past 30 days… Hurricane Joaquin never made landfall on the east coast, but moisture from the storm had a tremendous impact – particularly in South Carolina. In fact, the governor of the state said that the region had not seen that type of rain “in a thousand years”… “We haven’t had this level of rain in the low-country in a thousand years — that’s how big this is,” said South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Days of record rainfall and catastrophic flooding left at least seventeen people dead in South Carolina and two dead in North Carolina, Oct. 6, 2015. Thirteen dams have failed. It would be very difficult to overstate the amount of damage that was caused by this storm. Some officials are estimating that the total amount of economic damage done “will probably be in the billions of dollars”… The rains may have stopped in South Carolina, but the danger and the work to rebuild are far from over. “I believe that things will get worse before they get better,” Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin told reporters Monday. “Eventually the floods will abate, but then we have to access the damage, and I anticipate that damage will probably be in the billions of dollars, and we’re going to have to work to rebuild. Some peoples’ lives as they know them will never be the same,” he said. Of course this is far from the only destructive flooding event that we have seen in recent weeks. Out in California they have been getting hit with disaster after disaster. First, the wildfire season came very close to setting a national record this year, and it was particularly bad out west. The following comes from USA Today… The amount of land burned by wildfires in the U.S. this year has surpassed 9 million acres, according to data released Thursday by the National Interagency Fire Center. This is only the fourth time on record the country has reached the 9 million-acre mark, center spokesman Randall Eardley said in an e-mail. The area burned is roughly equivalent to the size of New Jersey and Connecticut combined. All of the top years for acres burned have occurred since 2000, Eardley said. The worst year occurred in 2006, with 9.8 million acres. In 2007 and 2012, 9.3 million acres were burned, he said. If another 800,000 acres are burned this year, an all-time record would be set. I have a feeling that when the final numbers are all in and tallied that 2015 will end up setting an all-time record for wildfires. But after a really dry, hot summer, southern California got surprised by a deluge of heavy rain this month and the results were absolutely catastrophic. The following comes from Fox News… A flood of mud and debris triggered by heavy rainfall in Southern California rushed onto streets and highways Thursday, stranding hundreds in their cars and closing a major interstate. Nearly 40 miles of Interstate 5 north in Los Angeles were still closed Friday afternoon after heavy rainfall sent mud, debris and even boulders streaming into the north-south running freeway, according to the California Department of Transportation. Some people, stuck in up to 5 feet of mud, were forced to camp overnight in their vehicles, according to NBC Los Angeles. Pictures on social media showed some cars submerged in debris up to the windshields. Authorities are still digging people out from this mess several days later. In fact, the dead body of one man was just pulled out of a van that had been encased in several feet of mud… Southern California fire crews discovered a man’s body Tuesday inside a van that had been buried under several feet of mud after a flash flood overran a road near Los Angeles last week. And just over this past weekend, the middle part of the country has had to deal with tremendous flooding as well. Hurricane Patricia turned out to be the world’s strongest hurricane since at least 1970, and the remnants of this storm are hitting the state of Texas quite hard. The small town of Powell, Texas got 20 inches of rain in just 30 hours, and a Union Pacific train that was running nearby was derailed by the heavy flood waters… A Union Pacific freight train carrying cement derailed in Navarro County after a creek overflowed, washing out the tracks. Locomotives and rail cars were pushed on their sides, and a two-person crew was forced to swim to safety. Repair teams cleared the derailed cars by Sunday morning, but they were not expected to be righted for several hours and a locomotive was not seen being moved until later in the day, Union Pacific spokesman Jeff DeGraff said on Sunday afternoon. All of this has happened within the past 30 days. So is there a reason why all of these events have happened? Of course some people say that it is just a coincidence that all of these storms have hit us in such close proximity. Others are pointing to the extremely strong El Nino that has developed. Here is an excerpt from a recent Bloomberg report… It has choked Singapore with smoke, triggered Pacific typhoons and left Vietnamese coffee growers staring nervously at dwindling reservoirs. In Africa, cocoa farmers are blaming it for bad harvests, and in the Americas, it has Argentines bracing for lower milk production and Californians believing that rain will finally, mercifully fall. El Nino is back and in a big way. Its effects are just beginning in much of the world — for the most part, it hasn’t really reached North America — and yet it’s already shaping up potentially as one of the three strongest El Nino patterns since record-keeping began in 1950. It will dominate weather’s many twists and turns through the end of this year and well into next. And it’s causing gyrations in everything from the price of Colombian coffee to the fate of cold-water fish. That certainly doesn’t sound promising for the months ahead. But some climate “experts” are really playing down the impact of El Nino. Instead, they are attempting to convince us that what we are witnessing is simply the result of “man-made climate change”, and they are using this as an opportunity to promote their agenda. And there are yet others that see a spiritual dimension to all of this. In fact, there are some out there that believe that all of this flooding could be a sign that the judgment of God on America has begun. So what do you think? Do you believe that there is a reason why the U.S. is experiencing so much flooding lately? Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below… Source      |
|
Posted: 26 Oct 2015 10:38 AM PDT
 Several cartons of narcotics seized from a Saudi prince by Lebanese authorities in Beirut.Abd al-Muhsen bin Walid bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud was detained on Monday at the Rafik Hariri International Airport in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, while in possession of 24 bags and eight suitcases full of narcotics. The Saudi prince was arrested along with four other individuals. They were charged with attempting to smuggle around two tonnes of captagon pills on their private jet to Saudi Arabia. Police have launched an investigation into the smuggling case. Captagon pills have “the typical effects of a stimulant” and produce “a kind of euphoria – you’re talkative, you don’t sleep, you don’t eat, you’re energetic,” according to Lebanese psychiatrist Ramzi Haddad. The drugs are reportedly the Takfiri Daesh militants’ favorite narcotics. Source      |
|
Posted: 26 Oct 2015 09:53 AM PDT
 US military and intelligence officials are anxious about Russian submarines and spy ships operating around undersea global communications cables, The New York Times reported, adding that the main concern is Russia cutting the cables during conflict. The report added that there was no concrete evidence supporting the concerns and was based on increased mistrust of any Russian activity. “I’m worried every day about what the Russians may be doing,” Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy’s submarine fleet in the Pacific, told the newspaper. The undersea cables are seen as a serious vulnerability because of their importance in US economy and military and the lack of protection against a potential attack. They carry global business worth more than $10 trillion a day and more than 95 percent of daily communications, according to the NYT. But the locations of most of the cables are well-known and can be relatively easily reached without anyone noticing. “The risk here is that any country could cause damage to the system and do it in a way that is completely covert, without having a warship with a cable-cutting equipment right in the area,” said Michael Sechrist, a former project manager for a Harvard-M.I.T. research project funded in part by the US Defense Department. The Pentagon is monitoring Russian Naval missions in the locations of the cables by spy satellites, ships and planes. One particular concern is the Russian scientific ship Yantar, which is operated by the Navy. It carries two Mir-type submersibles that can dive up to 6,000 meters. Last month, the ship cruised off the US East Coast on its way to Cuba, where a major cable lands near the US military base at Guantanamo Bay. The US itself has a history of tampering with other nations’ cables, although their interest has generally been in espionage. For example, the submarine USS Jimmy Carter is believed to have equipment for the underwater splicing of optical cables. Source     |
