Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday, 2 October 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 01 Oct 2014 03:17 AM PDT


US Senate Banking Committee members are calling for hearings and full investigation into alleged ties between Federal Reserve supervisors and officials at Goldman Sachs, a bank the Fed was supposed to be policing.
Congress must hold “oversight hearings on the disturbing issues” raised by the secretly recorded conversations between the Fed and Goldman officials, Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass, D) said on Friday. Portions of recordings from 2011 and 2012 were recently made public, apparently showing unwillingness by some Fed supervisors to both demand information from Goldman Sachs and criticize its conflict-of-interest policy.
“When regulators care more about protecting big banks from accountability than they do about protecting the American people from risky and illegal behavior on Wall Street, it threatens our whole economy,” Warren said in an emailed statement to Reuters, adding that the issues raised by the whistleblower should be addressed when Congress returns in November.
Joining in and requesting a “full and thorough investigation” into the allegations is another Democrat Sherrod Brown, who also sits on the Banking Committee. “For too long, too many financial regulators have been too cozy towards the very industry that they are meant to police.”
The tapes were recorded by a former New York Federal bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, who was an embedded supervisor with Goldman Sachs. She began the recordings when she became worried about what she was witnessing among her colleagues and at Goldman Sachs over a deal with Banco Santander. A record was needed in case events were disputed. Nearly seven months into her work Segarra was fired in May 2012, after as she claims she refused to alter a critical assessment of Goldman’s legal and compliance units.
After failing to sue the bank for unlawful termination, Segarra provided 46 hours of tapes to the investigative news outlet ProPublica and the public radio show, “This American Life.”
In a long meeting recorded the week before Segarra was fired, according to ProPublica, her boss repeatedly tried to persuade her to change her conclusion that “Goldman was missing a policy to handle conflicts of interest.” Insisting that her findings were submitted, she was allegedly ready to accept them being overruled by superiors, but “professionally” couldn’t agree with her boss.
The New York Fed, which is already under scrutiny from lawmakers over its ties with the banking industry, however claims the decision to terminate Segarra’s employment “was based entirely on performance grounds.”
In a statement posted on its website on Friday, the Fed wrote “the New York Fed works diligently to execute its supervisory authority in a manner that is most effective in promoting the safety and soundness of the financial institutions it is charged with supervising.”
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Posted: 01 Oct 2014 02:52 AM PDT


Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Barcelona, vowing to disobey Spain’s blocking of Catalonia’s independence referendum.
Some 5,000 angry Catalans gathered in one of the city’s main squares on Tuesday, waving Catalan independence flags and chanting ‘We will vote”.
“Not rain nor snow nor any court will stop us,” said Carme Forcadell, leader of the Catalan National Assembly, adding, “On November 9, we will vote and we will win.”
Pro-independence demonstrations were also held in several other Catalonian towns.
The protests follow a Monday decision by Spain’s constitutional court to suspend Catalonia’s referendum on independence after a request from the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
The Spanish government lodged a formal appeal with the constitutional court, asking it to declare the independence referendum illegal.
The Spanish premier expressed regret over a recent decision by Catalan President Artur Mas to call for the November 9 vote, which is designed to allow the region to declare its independence from Madrid.
Catalonia’s regional parliament has approved a law that allows its leaders to hold consultations on independence. However, a ‘Yes’ vote for independence in the referendum will not automatically lead to the secession of the region. The vote would only give Mas the mandate to negotiate independence with the Spanish administration.
The wealthy northeastern region of Spain has a population of 7.6 million people, accounting for nearly one-fifth of the country’s economy, and has been seeking independence for years.
Polls indicate that a huge majority of Catalans demand an independence referendum, encouraged by a similar referendum in Scotland earlier this month.
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Posted: 01 Oct 2014 02:44 AM PDT


Provisions would allow for quarantine of “well persons” who “do not show symptoms” of virus.
The Centers for Disease Control is advising funeral homes in the United States on how to handle the remains of Ebola victims, although officials are keen to stress that the development is not a cause for alarm.
A three page list of recommendations instructs funeral workers to wear protective gear while handling Ebola victims, as well as warning them not to carry out autopsies or to embalm corpses.
“If the outbreak of the potentially deadly virus is in West Africa, why are funeral homes in America being given guidelines?” asks WFSB.com.
Last night it was revealed that a Dallas hospital is holding a potential Ebola victim in “strict isolation” after the patient was admitted based on symptoms and “recent travel history.”
Alysia English, Executive Director of the Georgia Funeral Directors Association, dismissed suggestions that Americans should be alarmed by the recommendations.
“Absolutely not. In fact, if they weren’t hearing about it, they should be a whole lot more concerned,” said English.
As we reported earlier this month, the U.S. State Department ordered 160,000 Ebola hazmat suits, prompting concerns that officials were preparing for an outbreak within the United States.
While Ebola has so far been confined to the continent of Africa, speculation has arisen that the virus could have gone airborne to at least a limited extent.
Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, acknowledged in a recent New York Times op-ed that virologists are “loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private” the possibility that Ebola has gone airborne.
Top German virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit caused consternation recentlywhen he suggested that the battle against Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia was lost and that the virus would eventually kill 5 million people.
As we reported back in 2009, the State of New York Division of Cemeteries sent out “Mass Fatality forms” to cemeteries in that state to collect data about their ability to deal with the high volume of casualties that would occur if their were a flu pandemic or other disaster.
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Posted: 01 Oct 2014 02:21 AM PDT


A new poll shows that 80 percent of Gazans favor the resumption of rocket attacks on Israel if the Tel Aviv regime does not end siege on the Gaza Strip.
As many as 12,000 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank participated in the survey which was conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.
The poll comes a month after Israel’s 50-day devastating war on Gaza ended. Israel unleashed aerial attacks on Gaza in early July and later expanded its military campaign with a ground invasion into the Palestinian territory. Over 2,130 Palestinians lost their lives and some 11,000 were injured. According to Israeli sources, more than 70 Israeli were also killed. Palestinian officials put this number at more than 150.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement said late in August that it fired over 3,000 rockets on dozens of Israeli cities during the war Tel Aviv imposed on the besieged Gaza Strip.
The resistance group said that over 60 of these projectiles fired by its al-Quds Brigades landed in main Israeli cities including Tel Aviv, al-Quds (Jerusalem), Dimona and Netanya. It also said they have targeted Ashdod, Beersheba, Ashkelon and Ofkim with over 660 grad rockets.
The group added that Israeli camps and soldiers have also been targeted with these rockets. It said al-Quds Brigades attacked Israeli tanks along Gaza borders with nearly 900 mortar shells.
Gaza has been blockaded by the Israeli regime since June 2007, a situation that has caused a decline in the standards of living, unprecedented levels of unemployment, and unrelenting poverty.
The apartheid regime of Israel denies about 1.8 million people in Gaza their basic rights, such as freedom of movement, jobs that pay proper wages, and adequate healthcare and education.
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Posted: 01 Oct 2014 02:10 AM PDT
2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa – Outbreak Distribution Map (US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed on Tuesday that the first case of Ebola has been diagnosed in the US.
On Monday, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas admitted a patient into strict isolation to be evaluated for potential Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), based on the patient’s symptoms and recent travel history, according to a statement by the hospital.
By Tuesday afternoon, the CDC had received preliminary blood test results back, confirming that the patient was indeed infected with the potentially deadly virus.
The patient had recently traveled to Liberia, leaving the West African country on September 19 and arriving in the US on the following day. The patient had no Ebola symptoms when leaving Liberia or entering the United States, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said during a press conference.
Around September 24, the patient began developing symptoms, which are often non-specific, Frieden noted. On Sunday, the victim sought care for those symptoms, and was admitted to the Texas hospital and put in an isolation ward. The patient is currently “critically ill,” according to the CDC director.
“It does not appear the individual was involved in the response to Ebola, but we will investigate to learn more,” Frieden said.
Ebola does not spread during the eight to 10-day average incubation period, which can last as short as two days or as long as 21 days. All air travelers leaving West Africa are screened for fevers both before and after the flight.
“We [health professionals] all had been planning to look at what our next steps are if there is a confirmed case,” Dallas County Health and Human Services director Zachary Thompson said to KTVT Monday night. “Again, we have to do the public health follow up to see what contacts, where this individual has gone since they arrived here in Dallas. There are a number of things that have to be looked at.”
Thompson reminded North Texans who may have come into contact with the patient that the disease, while contagious, is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. “The key point is, if there’s been no transmission, blood, secretion, any type of bodily fluids by the infected person to someone else, then that [infection] risk is low to none.”
On Tuesday, Thompson further sought to calm fears in Dallas. “This is not Africa,” Thompson told WFAA. “We have a great infrastructure to deal with an outbreak.”
Officials are working to identify anyone who has come into contact with the patient since he returned from Liberia, hoping to monitor them for symptoms over the next 21 days to see if they develop a fever. If they do, their contacts will also be identified and monitored.
“The bottom line here is that I have no doubt that we will control this importation, this case of Ebola so that it doesn’t spread widely. It is possible a family member or friend could develop the disease in next couple weeks,” Frieden said. “This is core epidemiological work.”
The CDC is dispatching a team of epidemiologists and other experts to Texas in response to the preliminary Ebola diagnosis. There are currently over 130 agency experts in West Africa as well.
According to statistics released by the CDC in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO), the virus has infected 6,574 people in West Africa, 3,091 of whom have been killed. On Friday, theWHO warned that the figures “vastly underestimate the true scale of the epidemic.” The deadly virus is ravaging parts of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, with smaller outbreaks in Nigeria and Senegal. The situation in Senegal, where the disease arrived at the end of August, remains stabilized, the WHO announced in mid-September.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 18:14