Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday, 4 July 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 04 Jul 2014 01:31 AM PDT
There were no immediate reports of injuries and some counties reported only minimal damage.
Hurricane Arthur has stormed its way through the US East Coast, marking the first hurricane of this year’s Atlantic season.
Hitting North Carolina’s coast along with Boston and the state of Maryland, the hurricane has left thousands of people without power.
Dare County officials said Wednesday that the mandatory evacuation of Hatteras Island would begin at 5 a.m. Thursday. After that time, no one will be allowed on the island.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory told residents and tourists to stay inside. He said the potential track for the storm would move it closer to land.
“We did not expect this western movement,” he told reporters Thursday night. “So we’re most concerned now about flooding inland and storm surges in our sounds and in our rivers.”
The US National Hurricane Center has classified the hurricane a Category-2 storm, with winds of over 160 kilometers per hour.
According to the Miami-based center, the eye of the storm was moving over southern Pamlico Sound while hurricane conditions spread north along the Outer Banks.
The center said on Friday that Arthur is expected to “begin weakening later today and become a post-tropical cyclone tonight or Saturday.”
It’s the first hurricane to hit the US since 2012 and the third time in the past two decades that a major storm has formed before the Fourth of July, according to Weather 2000 Inc. in New York.
The hurricane center said the storm will pass southeast of New England today and be near or over western Nova Scotia early tomorrow.
The National Weather Service in Wilmington said 1 1/3 inches of rain fell during one hour Thursday afternoon. The office also tweeted that there was some flooding just south of downtown.
There were no immediate reports of injuries and some counties reported only minimal damage.
In 2009, tropical cyclones left six people dead, all drowned in large waves or rip currents.
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Posted: 04 Jul 2014 12:46 AM PDT

A U.S. Border Patrol union representative says understaffing and poorly equipped, unsanitary facilities are making the general public more susceptible to the myriad diseases accompanying the wave of illegal aliens currently bypassing the US-Mexico border.
Following the documentation of two H1N1 virus cases among illegal minors being held in south Texas facilities, National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 Vice President Chris Cabrera says he’s concerned diseases could spread beyond the confines of detention centers to local residents and indeed “all over the United States.”
“No showers, no pillows, no bedding, nothing, there’s a lot of dust, a lot of dirt floating around in there – very grim conditions,” Cabrera said, describing the lack of resources to Action 4 News.

Cabrera says the temporary facilities simply aren’t designed to deal with such a massive amount of people. “We’re just so overwhelmed, we’re not outfitted, we’re not designed to be a long term holding facility,” Cabrera lamented. “You know everything there is just put together on the fly. We’re not prepared to deal with something like this and so things are getting through.”
He also says so-called “quarantine areas” are laughable and do little to keep anyone safe.
“The quarantine area is nothing more than a piece of yellow caution tape,” Cabrera said. “Do not cross this line, if you cross this line, this is where the people with scabies are, the people with chicken pox, or whatever. So there really is no barrier between one and the other.”
This could cause communicable diseases, like the H1N1 virus, to more easily spread to the public, he says. “It’s highly contagious just like the regular flu and anybody that comes in contact with him symptomatic or asymptomatic can potentially get H1N1 and spread it. It can be fatal,” Cabrera warned.
Various agents have already contracted diseases after being exposed to afflicted individuals, and reports suggest the influx may potentially bring with it other deadly diseases such as dengue, HIV and the incurable ebola virus.
Last week, when the vice president of National Border Patrol Council Local 1929 in El Paso sought federal assistance for agents, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told him “they had no interest in this issue”.
However, on Tuesday, Infowars confirmed the CDC had indeed activated their Emergency Operation Center in response to the immigration influx, meaning the federal government now considers the illegal immigrant health crisis a “public health threat,” but no information beyond this has been provided. That means vital questions, such as: what diseases have been found, the frequency of those diseases, and which facilities had the highest rates of disease, remain unanswered.
The fact that immigrants are still being processed and shipped to other parts of the country, Cabrera says, puts the health of the nation at considerable risk. “They are coming in and it’s going to spread here to the locals in the Rio Grande Valley,” Cabrera predicts. “These people are taking buses, planes, trains all over the United States and so they are going to be taking those diseases with them.”
Medical professionals, such as Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, agree. She recently characterized the disease-ridden conditions in detention facilities as “a ticking time bomb” waiting to go off. Hardest-hit, she says, will be those with weak immune systems.
“A public health crisis, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime, is looming,” the doctorreported last month. “Hardest hit by exposures to these difficult-to-treat diseases will be elderly, children, immunosuppressed cancer-patients, patients with chronic lung disease or congestive heart failure. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is the most serious risk, but even diseases like measles can cause severe complications and death in older or immunocompromised patients.”
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Posted: 04 Jul 2014 12:31 AM PDT
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) seen under an electron microscope.
A UN health official says most of the confirmed cases of Respiratory Syndrome Corona-Virus (MERS-CoV) could have been prevented as infection rates for the virus are slowing.
Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Keiji Fukuda said on Thursday that there have been 824 confirmed cases of MERS, including at least 286 deaths, since last year.
Fukuda added that around 40 percent of those who became infected with MERS have died, describing it “a much higher-than-normal fatality rate” for a virus.
“If we take a look at all of the people that we know got infected (in hospitals), probably the vast majority of those people’s infections could have been prevented,” he added.
According to the official, scientists hope to gain enough information in about a year to be able to stop MERS from spreading further across the world.
The virus first emerged in the Middle East and was discovered in September 2012 in a Qatari man who had traveled to Saudi Arabia.
MERS is a cousin of SARS. The virus, which causes coughing, fever and pneumonia, does not appear to be as contagious as SARS, which killed some 800 people in a 2003 epidemic.
In addition to Saudi Arabia, which is worst hit by the virus, MERS has been reported in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Italy, Tunisia, Britain and the United States.
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Posted: 04 Jul 2014 12:25 AM PDT
University Research Park, where Kawaoka conducts flu GOF experiments.
A controversial flu researcher has modified the flu virus responsible for the 2009 pandemic to allow it evade the human immune system. His lab’s previous works include recreating the Spanish flu and making a deadly bird flu strain highly transmittable.
The yet-to-be-published research by Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka and his team is meant to give scientists better ways to fight influenza outbreaks, but gives chills to some people in academia, who are fearful that accidental release of the strain would result in a global disaster, according to a report by the Independent.
At his level-3 biosafety lab at Wisconsin University’s Institute for Influenza Virus Research in Madison, Kawaoka experimented with the H1N1 flu strain that was responsible for the pandemic in 2009, dubbed the swine flu pandemic by the media. The work resulted in a mutated strain that is able to evade the human antibodies, effectively rendering humans defenseless against the virus.
“He took the 2009 pandemic flu virus and selected out strains that were not neutralized by human antibodies. He repeated this several times until he got a real humdinger of a virus,” a scientist familiar with Kawaoka’s research told the British newspaper.
“He’s basically got a known pandemic strain that is now resistant to vaccination. Everything he did before was dangerous but this is even madder. This is the virus,” he added.
H1N1 flu had caused serious outbreaks and two recorded pandemics, the first being the notorious Spanish flu of 1918. Kawaoka’s newest work is partially derived from his experience in recreating the deadly strain.
The first H1N1 pandemic left between 50 and 100 million people dead, according to estimates. The 2009 pandemic death toll is debated, with some estimates putting the number as high as 560,000, most of them in Africa and Southeast Asia.
The professor assured the newspaper that the mutant virus is well under control in his lab and that making a strain that can beat human immune system will help epidemiologists be prepared for a contingency of a similar mutation occurring naturally.
“Through selection of immune escape viruses in the laboratory under appropriate containment conditions, we were able to identify the key regions [that] would enable 2009 H1N1 viruses to escape immunity,” he said in an email.
“Viruses in clinical isolates have been identified that have these same changes in the [viral protein]. This shows that escape viruses emerge in nature and laboratory studies like ours have relevance to what occurs in nature,” he added.
The research was approved by Wisconsin’s Institutional Biosafety Committee, although a minority of the 17-member board is critical of Kawaoka’s line of study. One such vocal critic at the committee is Thomas Jeffries, who argues that an accidental release of the virus from the safe lab is possible, citing the recent incident at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which potentially exposed some 80 people to anthrax bacteria.
“I think we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we have more control over a situation in a laboratory than we do,” he told Wisconsin State Journal last week. “Accidents do happen.”
When The Independent approached Jeffries for comments on Kawaoka’s new research, he said he was not made aware of details of the study at the time the approval was given.
“What was present in the research protocols was a very brief outline or abstract of what he was actually doing…there were elements to it that bothered me,” Professor Jeffries said.
Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918.
Rebecca Moritz, who is responsible for overseeing Wisconsin’s work at the institute, said it is needed to create new vaccines.
“The work is designed to identify potential circulating strains to guide the process of selecting strains used for the next vaccine…The committee found the biosafety containment procedures to be appropriate for conducting this research. I have no concerns about the biosafety of these experiments,” she said.
Kawaoka said he presented preliminary results of his research to the World Health Organization and they had been “well received.”
“We are confident our study will contribute to the field, particularly given the number of mutant viruses we generated and the sophisticated analysis applied,” he explained.
“There are risks in all research. However, there are ways to mitigate the risks. As for all the research on influenza viruses in my laboratory, this work is performed by experienced researchers under appropriate containment and with full review and prior approval by the [biosafety committee],” he added.
Flu virus strains are notorious for changing rapidly, with new strains emerging and causing seasonal flu epidemics. Scientists have to try and predict what kind of flu they would have to face each year and have a vaccine ready. When they succeed, an outbreak causes much less damage that it could have otherwise.
Research of ‘gain of function’ by viruses like the works of Kawaoka is focused on exploring how a virus can become deadlier and more transmittable or resistant to existing vaccines. Critics of such studies say they are too dangerous, both due to the risk of accidental or even deliberate release.
For instance some people in the academia called on Kawaoka to withhold parts of his research on H5N1 bird flu. Normally the virus is highly lethal, but does not transmit well, but a series of experiments with ferrets resulted in an easily transmittable strain. The experiments were simple enough for any person with expertise in microbiology to replicate, which critics said some group of would-be bioterrorists would eventually do.
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Posted: 03 Jul 2014 02:00 PM PDT

At least two people were killed and several others injured as an overpass collapsed in the Brazilian World Cup host city of Belo Horizonte, according to the local fire department.
A city bus and several vehicles were crushed after a part of a bridge, which was under construction, fell onto a busy highway. People may be trapped under the debris.
O’Globo’s footage showed a yellow bus crushed under part of the bridge. G1 said another two trucks and a vehicle were also smashed.
At least 19 people have been injured according to fire department, globo.com reports.
O’Globo’s footage showed a yellow bus crushed under part of the bridge. G1 said another two trucks and a vehicle were also smashed.
At least 19 people have been injured according to fire department, globo.com reports.
Belo Horizonte is to host a semifinal match on July 8. The city’s Mineriao Stadium has already staged five games at the event.
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Posted: 03 Jul 2014 01:55 PM PDT

The World Health Organization (WHO) is hosting an emergency meeting in Ghana as the death toll from the deadly Ebola virus keeps rising in West Africa.
Health officials from eleven African countries are meeting in Ghana’s capital city of Accra on Wednesday to find a way to contain the deadliest outbreak of the virus in history.
Representatives from Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uganda attended the meeting. Dozens of International organizations, including various UN agencies, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will also participate in today’s meeting.
The WHO said on Tuesday that there have now been 759 confirmed or suspected cases of Ebola, which has affected Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The UN health agency said the latest figures showed a 38-percent increase in the number of deaths and a 27-percent rise in the number of overall cases since June 24. It also said the death toll in West Africa has risen to 467, with 68 of the deaths recorded since the WHO’s last update.
Figures indicate that Guinea has been hardest-hit by the outbreak, where some 413 cases and 303 deaths from hemorrhagic fever are believed to be due to the Ebola virus. Liberia has so far reported 65 deaths, while Sierra Leone has seen 239 patients who are believed to be suffering from the disease, of whom, 99 have lost their lives.
Health officials say the region’s porous borders have allowed infected people to carry the disease into other countries. The WHO says “drastic” action is needed to stamp out the virus and ensure it does not spread to other countries in the region.
There is currently no known cure for Ebola, a form of hemorrhagic fever whose symptoms are diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding.
The virus spreads through direct contact with infected blood, feces or sweat. It can be also spread through sexual contact or the unprotected handling of contaminated corpses.
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Posted: 03 Jul 2014 01:51 PM PDT

According to John Young and Cryptome Snowden documents rumored to be released this month will prevent a war planned by the United States.
The tweet seems to suggest this will happen around the time the globalist Aspen Institute holds its annual Security Forum. The event will feature former NSA directors Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden.
Cryptome also mentions the biannual Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) event in New York City that kicks off on July 18.
“We look forward to continuing to aid and abet release of carefully orchestrated disclosures of sensitive and classified material,” Young told Eric Markowitz, a reporter for Vocativ, in anemail dated June 30.
“Snowden documents will be released in July. If the contending parties have their way, all of the documents will be released to kickstart the war on terrorism, in Iraq, in Iran, in North Korea, in the Holy Land, across Africa, Caribbean Drug Sea, the US-Mexican border, and the areas of operations always on alert in DC, Fort Meade and Colorado Springs,” Young said.
John Young was elusive about the release, but said Cryptome will not publish the 57,000 to 1.7 million documents taken from the NSA.
“Given that only a few people are known to have access to the documents Snowden took from the NSA, it is believed that journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras may be involved in the release of the information. However, neither Greenwald, nor Poitras has confirmed or denied any involvement in the July release,” writes Katie Rucke for MintPress News.
Two of the most likely candidates for increased tension are Iraq and the U.S. border, both mentioned by John Young in his email.
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Posted: 03 Jul 2014 01:40 PM PDT
Graffiti is painted on walls and the entrance of an electric station of Public Power Corporation (PPC) in Athens, July 2, 2014.
Greece faces massive power cuts as unions have threatened to disrupt the country’s power supply in row over government plans to break up the country’s main electricity provider.
Workers of Greece’s Public Power Corporation (PPC) said they would go on strike on Thursday to protest a privatization program planned by the government.
Athens plans to privatize the PPC as part of a government drive to liberalize Greece’s energy market.
“PPC must remain under public control to ensure there is cheap electricity for consumers,” A PPC union group said in a statement.
The strike would mean many homes without electricity at the height of the Greek summer.
On June 6, members of civil servant unions in Greece staged a protest rally in the capital, Athens, in support of hundreds of staff sacked from the Finance Ministry.
Greece’s economy has been relying on international bailout funds worth 240 billion euros (USD 322 billion) and on short-term bonds. In exchange, the government has implemented harsh austerity measures.
Since 2010, the national health, education and local government budgets have been cut down by some 40 percent and so have wages and pensions.
The country’s unemployment rate currently stands at a record level of nearly 28 percent.
Greece, which has been in recession since 2008, is at the epicenter of the debt crisis in the eurozone.
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Posted: 03 Jul 2014 01:21 PM PDT

Anti-immigration protesters impeded the arrival of several buses transporting undocumented immigrants into a US Border Patrol station in Murrieta, California on Tuesday, some 60 miles north of San Diego.
The arrival of the group of Central American families had been decried by Murrieta’s mayor, Alan Long, who alleged that the group of immigrants, adults with their children numbering about 140 people, represented a public safety threat to the community.
Assembled protesters, who numbered 150, converged on a street leading up to an access road into the processing center, preventing the two buses from reaching the facility, reported Reuters.
Police at the scene did not attempt to break up the demonstration, which included picket signs with messages such as “Return to sender” and “Bus illegal children to the White House,” and anti-immigration slogans. Almost a half hour into the incident, the two unmarked buses turned around and left.
A representative of the border patrol agents union said that the immigrants would likely be rerouted to one of the other six Border Patrol stations in the San Diego region. Local news reports seemed to confirm that the 140 undocumented immigrants were instead being driven to the Chula Vista Border Patrol facility in San Diego County.
The Central American immigrants had been flown to San Diego from Texas, and were on their way for processing at the Murrieta facility where US immigration officials told Reuters they would be released under supervision and await deportation.
Tuesday’s incident in Murrieta highlights the influx of both families and unattended minors from Central America, which have strained the border patrol’s resources and led to the creation of several temporary processing facilities to deal with overflow conditions in Texas.
Unlike undocumented immigrants from Mexico, who are subject to immediate deportation, the latest influx of families and children feeling violence and poverty in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are instead subject to processing by authorities.
Unaccompanied minors are the responsibility of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which is currently scrambling to create enough housing and provide basic care. Some 500,000 unattended children have crossed into the US illegally within the past year alone. The agency’s program, Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), was only meant to serve the needs of some 8,000 children per year while being processed through US immigration court.
Temporary facilities have been set up in Nogales, Arizona to cope with overflow from South Texas. Meanwhile, another group of immigrants had been driven to a similar facility in El Centro, California, some 100 miles east of San Diego.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 08:45