Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Wednesday, 6 January 2016

The European Union Times

Link to The European Union Times – World News, Breaking News

Posted: 06 Jan 2016 01:35 AM PST

North Korea has announced that it has successfully tested a miniaturized hydrogen bomb following an “artificial seismic event” that has likely become the country’s fourth known nuclear test.
In a “special and important” announcement at noon, North Korean TV claimed that the country has successfully conducted a hydrogen bomb test at 10:00am local time.
“Through the test conducted with indigenous wisdom, technology and efforts the DPRK fully proved that the technological specifications of the newly developed H-bomb for the purpose of [the] test were accurate and scientifically verified the power of [the] smaller H-bomb,” the statement said.
“It was confirmed that the H-bomb test conducted in a safe and perfect manner had no adverse impact on the ecological environment,” it added.
The announcement followed the USGS detection of a 5.1 magnitude earthquake in the vicinity of a known Pyongyang nuclear site.
The epicenter of the jolt was located 19 kilometers (12 miles) east-northeast of Sungjibaegam, Ryanggang Province, at a depth of 10 kilometers, according to preliminary data from the US Geological Survey (USGS). Similar seismic activity in roughly the same area was recorded on February 12, 2013, prior to North Korea claiming its third successful underground nuclear test.
The “unusual” seismic activity near a “known” North Korean nuclear site seems to be of artificial origin and was a clear sign of a nuclear test, Yonhap reported.
“The Foreign Ministry is currently holding a meeting presided over by the minister to immediately determine the situation following the reports,” a ministry official said, according to the South Korean news agency.
South Korea’s intelligence agency is analyzing the probability of a fourth nuclear test having taken place, while the National Security Council is preparing to hold a meeting to discuss the issue, Yonhap reported.
Japan’s chief government spokesman also said the earthquake was “likely caused” by a nuclear test, Reuters reports. Meanwhile a US defense official said the department was “looking into the reports of a possible seismic event near North Korean nuclear facilities.”
North Korea first declared that it created a nuclear bomb in 2005. Since then, Pyongyang has conducted three known underground tests. The first, conducted in 2006 at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site in the northeast of the country, contained five to 10 kilotons of explosives. It was recorded by seismic stations in Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and Australia.
The second and third tests were conducted in May 2009 and January 2013, increasing the power of the devices tested 10 to 20 kilotons of TNT each.
North Korea’s 2013 test triggered sanctions from the UN Security Council, which put restrictions on the county’s banking, trade and travel immediately.
Pyongyang also operates a nuclear reactor at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, North Korea’s major nuclear facility, about 90 kilometers from the capital.
North Korea has repeatedly threatened the use its nuclear weapons in case of a violation of its sovereignty. Last month Pyongyang claimed that it had become a “great nuclear power capable of defending the independence and national dignity of our homeland by mighty nuclear and hydrogen strikes.”
However, it is not known whether North Korea had managed to develop a nuclear device small enough to be used as a warhead on a ballistic missile.
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Posted: 05 Jan 2016 02:49 PM PST

President Barack Obama formally announced plans to expand background checks to buy guns and impose other restrictions on firearms through executive action. The order bypasses Congress, further feeding sentiments about the administration’s overreach.
Obama’s emotional address, made from the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, was the latest in a series of attempts to make gun regulations stricter, this time without the help of Congress.
“Every year, more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns,” Obama said. The US is not inherently more prone to violence than anywhere else in the world, but the only advanced nation where gun violence is so frequent, he noted.
There is “a general consensus in America about what is to be done” about gun violence, Obama said. Restrictions on free speech do not overturn the First Amendment, and going through metal detectors at airports do not abolish privacy, the president argued – they are merely “part of the price of living in a civilized society.”
“This is not a plot to take away everybody’s guns,” Obama said, to applause from the audience.
The president was introduced by Mark Barden, the father of a shooting victim at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Obama also referred to former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a shooting in Arizona five years ago this week and was in attendance.
The measure will broaden the definition of a gun dealer and expand the mandatory background checks to private sales, including on what some call the “gun show loophole.” Gun sellers at flea markets, gun shows and online have been able to dodge federal requirements by choosing to forego a dealer’s license. The new executive action will expand the definition so that those individuals will be considered gun dealers as well.
The action will also mandate the hiring of more FBI personnel for the agency’s background check system, so the government can process background checks “24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” To enforce the new rules, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Arms and Explosives (ATF) will get 200 more agents.
Another part of the initiative will involve a $500 million request from Congress to increase access to mental health services, since many believe mental illness to be a major factor in mass shootings. Patient records concerning mental health will be shared with the background check database, Obama announced.
Technology should be developed to make guns safer, the president argued, including child-proofing and digital locks.
“If we can’t unlock our phone without having the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same for guns?” Obama said.
The president teared up as he brought up the first-graders killed in Newtown and urged Americans to “stand up to the gun lobby’s lies.”
Republican critics have accused the president of going too far with the action, calling it executive overreach, and have threatened to fight it by withholding Justice Department funding.
Obama, however, is trying his best to sell the measure to the American people. In addition to creating a “fact sheet” about the executive action on the White House website, he is set to join Anderson Cooper on CNN in an hour-long town hall on gun control this Thursday.
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Posted: 05 Jan 2016 02:18 PM PST

China unveiled three new units to its military: a force to oversee strategic missiles, an army general command and strategic support force, Chinese state media reported.
President Xi Jinping described the modernization reform as “a major policy decision to realize the Chinese dream of a strong army.”
The new units, along with the building of a second aircraft carrier, come at a time when Beijing is being more assertive in territorial disputes in the South China Sea and East China Sea, escalating tensions with its neighbors and with the United States.
The reforms include a new People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit established to oversee China’s arsenal of strategic missiles.
In addition to the so-called “Rocket Force,” the PLA also unveiled an army general command to serve as the headquarters for land forces and a support unit to assist combat troops, the official Xinhua news agency said.
In an effort to create a more efficient fighting force, President Xi announced in September plans to cut the number of Chinese troops by about 300,000 to approximately 2 million soldiers.
Beijing is also expanding its naval capacity, building a second aircraft carrier to join the one that was commissioned in 2012.
The modernization comes as China flexes its military muscles with Japan in the East China Sea and with its Southeast Asian neighbors in the South China Sea.
China claims nearly all of the South China Sea, through which some $5 trillion in trade passes annually. But the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan have overlapping claim.
The Global Times newspaper said new conditions required a strong army and cited the United States as a reason.
“If China has a big gap with the US in terms of military prowess, this will affect its international position and other countries’ attitude toward China,” it said in an editorial posted on its website Saturday.
“With a strong army, China can be more politically appealing, influential and persuasive.”
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Posted: 05 Jan 2016 02:01 PM PST

United Nations, (Prensa Latina) Uruguay took over on Friday (01) the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, in a global scenario marked by conflicts such as Syria, Yemen and Burundi.
Monday, the body of 15 members set its monthly program of work, which no doubt will occupy important places mentioned above trying to solve the crisis and find the actions possible to find a political solution.
The agenda will also include the analysis of UN peacekeeping forces, including those set out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Somalia and Darfur (Sudan).
Under the Uruguayan presidency, the Council will hold an open debate on the protection of civilians.
Speaking to Prensa Latina, shortly after the South American country’s election as new non-permanent member for a period of two years, Deputy Foreign Minister José Luis Cancela ensured that Montevideo will defend in the Security Council the search for peace and respect for International law.
We will make great efforts, under strict respect for international law, to advance the peaceful settlement of conflicts, he said.
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Posted: 05 Jan 2016 01:00 PM PST

The German authorities must do everything to prevent a repeat of the mass sexual assaults committed in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the country’s justice minister, Heiko Maas, said, promising swift punishment for the perpetrators.
“What happened at the Cologne main train station and other locations in Germany is unacceptable, it may not repeat itself and the offenders have to be punished,” Maas said during a press-conference in Berlin on Tuesday.
Cologne police received at least 60 complaints of various sexual assaults, including one allegation of rape, after New Year celebrations in the city.
The women were attacked by a group of around 1,000 young men, described by witnesses as being of “Arab or North African” origin and intoxicated, in the central square near Cologne Central Station.
One of the victims of the attack said that her bottom and breasts were grabbed, and that she had been “touched around 100 times” by the mob.
“We need to clarify whether this was a new form of organized crime, which state institutions have to take action against,” the justice minister said.
“We are focused on determining the assailants and to introduce them to their punishment,” Maas added, stressing that “all are equal before the law.”
According to the minister, not only the perpetrators, but also “those who were there, who had provided the setting, that women could not escape,” will also face justice as “accomplices” to the crime.
Cologne’s Mayor, Henriette Reker, held a crisis meeting on Tuesday over the mass sexual assaults, saying afterwards that she expects “the strictest prosecution” for the attackers.
The mayor also urged more preventative measures to be implemented in the city to avoid similar incidents in the future.
“For me prevention means, of course, to think about the fact that, especially, young women and girls were involved there and these young women and girls must be better protected. This means that they must party, party Carnival [hosted by Cologne in February], but this time they should be better prepared than they were until now,” he said.
During the election campaign last autumn, Reker received a knife wound from a man angered by the influx of refugees to Germany and the mayor’s pro-migrant stance.
The city police, Wolfgang Albers, said that police presence in Cologne will be reinforced after the events.
“This will happen with open presence and hidden presence. We will also organize a trouble spot, especially for the Carnival. And there will also be temporary video surveillance,” Albers said.
‘I wouldn’t walk alone at night here anymore’
RT took to streets of Cologne and talked to local women, who said that their life would not be same after what happened.
“Now I wouldn’t walk alone at night here anymore, I would make sure that I am accompanied. I wouldn’t take lone streets anymore and I would stay in bigger groups,” one of the women said.
“I find it horrible,” another woman said. “The girls to whom this happened won’t be happy anymore, they will pass their lives being afraid and I am also afraid when I have to go to the main station in the dark.”
She also blamed the police for its inability to stop the sexual crimes that were committed near Cologne Central Station.
“I wonder where the police were. The police is always that present at the station. Were they that afraid of those men, that they didn’t intervene? Was there no possibility to do something?” the woman wondered.
Eventually, 200 officers were deployed in the center of the city to disperse the crowd on New Year’s Eve, including 143 local policemen in addition to 70 federal officers.
Germany has been the main destination for refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, with the country accommodating nearly 1.1 million refugees in 2015, according to the Saechsische Zeitung daily.
The Cologne attacks took place hours after a New Year address by Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which she expressed confidence that Germany would succeed in integrating refugees and benefit from their arrival.
“We can do it,” Merkel said, adding that Germans should strike the perfect balance between being simultaneously “self-confident and free, humanitarian and open to the world” so that “our values, our traditions, our sense of justice, our language, our laws, our rules” could be applied “to all who wish to live here.”
Pegida forecasts coming true?
There is a connection between the immigrant flow to Germany and the sexual assaults in Cologne, Tatjana Festerling, one of the key-figures in German anti-immigrant Pegida group, told RT.
Al least eight people involved in attacks on women on New Year’s Eve “had their asylum seeking papers with them,” she said.
According to the activist, the events in Cologne are “exactly what we (Pegida) have been warning for over a year.”
They will surely boost anti-immigrant moods in Germany as “one can’t blame people that they become more radical facing this attack on our liberal order,” she said.
Festerling also noted that it took five days for the news of the assaults to reach the media because the German “politicians are trying to conceal and deny it.”
“In Germany this so-called ‘welcome culture’ is like a religion. And everybody, who criticizes uncontrolled flooding with mostly Muslim young men, is called a Nazi and has to shut up,” she said.
“It’s really the question why the police wasn’t better prepared for this New Year’s evening,” the activist wondered as the males who were believed to have been responsible for the attacks on women, were already known to the police as troublemakers.
The police shouldn’t be blamed for the Cologne events as it’s simply overwhelmed by the amount of people arriving in Germany despite having no right for political refugee status, Michael Opperskalski, the editor in chief of local magazine, Geheim, said.
“The government and responsible institutions are giving safe haven for criminal gangs” in order for them to be organized in Germany and used “as foot soldiers for regime change also in Algeria, Syria and other countries in the Middle East,” Opperskalski told RT.
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Posted: 05 Jan 2016 12:49 PM PST

Amid the mounting refugee crisis caused by “NATO’s non-stop campaign of overseas military misadventures”, Europeans are becoming “increasingly wary of multiculturalism, neo-liberal reforms, austerity measures – and now, it seems, even NATO itself,” according to American writer and journalist Robert Bridge.
Bridge cites as an example a recent raid conducted by the Polish military police with the endorsement the country’s Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz on a NATO-linked counterintelligence center in Warsaw as an example.
In his opinion piece for RT’s website, Bridge quotes the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, according to which, “Authorities entered the complex using a duplicate key and then unceremoniously dismissed the director in absentia, Col. Krzysztof Dusza and replaced him with Col. Robert Bala. Dozens of other bureaucrats and assorted paper-shufflers were also relieved of their shadowy duties on the spot.”
“Nothing like this has happened in the history of NATO, where a member state attacks a NATO facility,” former Polish defense minister Tomasz Siemoniak commented on the incident to reporters.
“After all, what would cause a traditionally pro-Western country like Poland to ignore constitutional due process and risk relations with Brussels, NATO — not to mention the group’s top dog, Washington — by conducting a crack of dawn, neo-Nazi-style raid?” Bridge therefore questions.
And then provides an answer:
“Those who were surprised by Warsaw’s tough tactics fail to see which way the political winds are blowing not just in Poland, but across the EU.”
The author further elaborates that “much of the winds of change howling through the streets of Europe can be connected to the failure of US foreign policy, and the repercussions that has had on the European status quo”.
Bridge then provides other examples of the failed promises that President Obama so easily gave away to Europe back in 2009 and the gloomy reality: “Guantanamo Bay detention facility is still open for business, Libya is in dire straits, while the US military is operating in Syria, albeit with little or no effect on Islamic State, its proclaimed target”.
“Instead of being relieved from the warmongering insanity of the Bush era, the world is still embroiled knee-deep in crisis – and in new places (Libya, Syria and Pakistan) that exploded on Obama’s watch, as well as in Russia, where the Kremlin wised up fast to the fairy tale known as ‘reset’.”
The author, however, notes that the “crises now enveloping the world are not limited to those of a military nature: Ever since the 2008 Financial Crisis, the worst economic setback since the Great Depression, Europe has been mired in dismal economic growth and high unemployment, compounded by an insane influx of millions of refugees that are only serving to erode Europe’s financial prospects, to say nothing about demographics.”
To cope with all the hardships, “many once-proud, self-sufficient European countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, to name a few)” are forced to take on loans “from the very same global bankers that wrecked these national economies in the first place”.
“Ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Washington (and by extension, NATO) has only delivered Europe a series of global military debacles that the Old World – already suffering under the brutal dictate of IMF debt and World Bank measures – can now ill afford. Now toss a few million desperate refugees into the mix and you have awakened the raw spirit of right-wing political parties – from Le Pen’s Front National in France to Golden Dawn in Greece.”
“Personally, I can’t imagine that, in a situation where nearly every US foreign policy initiative over the last 15 years has resulted in utter chaos and catastrophe, the European people (still highly educated despite biting austerity) will fail to correctly add two-plus-two and conclude that NATO as an institution designed to defend their interests is also failing them in dramatic fashion,” Bridge therefore concludes.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 10:23