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Thursday, 6 November 2014

The European Union Times


Posted: 06 Nov 2014 01:12 AM PST


Democrats blame US President Barack Obama for their losses in the Senate, saying they were beleaguered by a deeply unpopular White House.
After months of bitter and costly campaigning, Republicans took the control of the Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
The Republican Party picked up at least seven Senate seats, securing a majority in the 100-member chamber.
Republicans won races in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia.
Opinion polls conducted prior to the elections showed President Obama’s approval ratings were in the low 40s, indicating frustration with a presidency beset with crisis and mismanagement.
Republicans in competitive Senate races labeled their Democratic opponents as rubber stamps for Obama and his policies.
“This election will be a referendum on the president,” Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said ahead of the elections. “He [Obama] will be indirectly on the ballot.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, said Tuesday night that the president’s policies “absolutely” ruined Democratic chances with voters.
“It doesn’t make sense that we have to fight so hard against our own government and our own administration and our president to try to find a balance,” Manchin told MSNBC.
“It was President Obama dragging candidates down across the country,” one Senate Democratic aide said, according to the Hill. “It was a tough map to start with and his numbers were especially bad in these states, making it that much harder to overcome.”
A GOP-led Congress will make life difficult for a president who is looking to establish his legacy with his second term entering a lame-duck phase.
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Posted: 06 Nov 2014 01:06 AM PST

The Internet is the greatest tool of free speech ever created that gave voice to billions of people along with power to bring down regimes, a member of the Anonymous movement told RT, adding that such power terrifies governments around the globe.
Crowds of people wearing masks to hide their faces have marched in hundreds of cities all over the world, marking the Guy Fawkes Day with a global ‘Million Mask March’. As the Anonymous movement protested against government corruption, corporate malfeasance and the expanding surveillance state, RT caught up with Old Holborn, member of the movement.
“The internet has the power to bring down regimes. That is what terrifies them. That is why they are now monitor our phone calls, they monitor our emails, and they monitor our free speech. It terrifies them. They have no particular jurisdiction over the internet. It belongs to everyone,” Holborn told RT.
Often described in the media as a loose-knit collective, Anonymous was propelled to public prominence in the last years over a series of politically-motivated cyber-attacks on businesses, government and religious institutions. Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online members that believe the anarchic space of the internet belongs to the people.
“The internet is the greatest tool we have for free speech and everywhere on the planet we all have a voice now, 7 billion of us. Yes of course, somebody is going to get upset at something somebody else says. But we have to realize we all have a voice. We’re all equal. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. That is freedom of choice and freedom of expression,” Holborn says.
The agenda of those behind Wednesday’s protests is wide-ranging. The movement is said to be growing in strength as global citizens report greater dissatisfaction with their local governments and because of the perception that corporation has a stranglehold on international politics.
“We are not looking for a unified alternative. What we are looking for is for government to leave us alone. It is that simple. That is why we don’t have leaders, it’s everybody. Anonymous is whatever you want it to be,” the activist told RT.
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Posted: 05 Nov 2014 07:50 AM PST
This trio of images obtained October 6, 2014 from NASA/JPL-Caltech depicts satellite observations of NASA/JPL-Caltechdeclining water storage in California as seen by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment(GRACE) satellites in June 2002 (L), June 2008 (C) and June 2014.
Water in the world’s largest aquifers is being pumped out at greater rates than can be replenished naturally. NASA says this poses a greater threat to US food supplies and global security than previously thought.
Groundwater in the globe’s largest aquifers, the US High Plains, California’s Central Valley, China and India, is being depleted at alarming rates according to new analysis by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The majority of the aquifers lie under the world’s great agricultural regions, and 80 percent of the world’s fresh water usage is in growing crops, meaning their reduction poses a serious threat to the world’s food supply.
“Nearly all of these [aquifers] underlie the world’s great agricultural regions and are primarily responsible for their high productivity,” wrote James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the JPL, in the Nature Climate Change journal. “Vanishing groundwater will translate to major declines in agricultural productivity and energy production, with the potential for skyrocketing food prices and profound economic and political ramifications.”
Analysts used a new software program called Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which measures tiny changes in an area’s gravitational pull to determine its groundwater capacity and creates satellite-based images for analysis.
The map below shows the rapidity of depleted groundwater reserves.
Global Groundwater Depletion NASA Grace Satellite
“Further declines in groundwater availability may well trigger more civil uprising and international violent conflict in the already water-stressed regions of the world, and new conflict in others,” said Famiglietti.
The GRACE surveys show, for instance, that the Northwestern India aquifer that straddles the border with Pakistan has been depleted at a rate of 17.7 cubic kilometers a year since 2013.
The Northern Middle East aquifer, meanwhile, loses 13 cubic kilometers a year with Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey all pumping water from it.
Two of the United States’ biggest groundwater reservoirs, the Central Valley aquifer in California and the Ogallala aquifer, which stretches from South Dakota to Texas, are losing a combined 15.6 cubic kilometers of water annually due to farmers and cities using up the supply.
Until this study, knowledge about groundwater has been absent because it is not visible like an empty riverbed or dry lake. Also problematic is the lack of data on how much groundwater there is on the planet.
“Very few major aquifers have been thoroughly explored in the manner of oil reservoirs,” wrote Famiglietti, as reported by Takepart.com. “As a result, the absolute volume of groundwater residing the beneath the land surface remains unknown.”
Famiglietti said this needs to be studied further and agriculture has to be made more efficient.
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Posted: 05 Nov 2014 07:41 AM PST


People in the British capital of London are preparing to stage a protest rally against the government’s austerity measures, mass surveillance programs, and human rights abuses.
The rally, organized by a group called Anonymous, is referred to as the Million Mask March, in which the participants hide their faces to protect their identities, and will begin from Trafalgar Square and end at the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday.
Similar demonstrations, will be held in hundreds of cities across the globe.
The organizers have set up pages on social media networks, urging people to attend the rally.
They predict that thousands of people will take part in the demonstration.
On the eve of the march, Anonymous sent a message to ‘world bodies of power.’
“To oppressive governments, we say this: we do not expect our campaign to be completed in a short time frame. However, you will not prevail against the angry masses,” the message read.
Anonymous members said British government officials have “made an enemy of Anonymous,” and “angered them considerably.”
According to an Anonymous source, the Million Mask March, which began in 2011, was initially called OpVendetta. Only 50 people attended the demonstration in the first year, but the participants increased considerably year by year.
The march was renamed the “Million Mask March” in 2013 and gathered over 2,500 people in some 400 cities worldwide, the source said.
The annual anti-austerity protest in the UK comes after a series of similar rallies and strikes in the country in September and October.
The current UK government launched austerity measures when it came to power in 2010 in a bid to tackle the country’s mounting debt and sluggish growth, but the policies have sparked opposition and public protests in recent years.
The UK government came under pressure over a phone hacking scandal, in which phone communications were intercepted between 2000 and 2006.
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Posted: 05 Nov 2014 07:29 AM PST

With just about every poll and pundit predicting Republican success in Tuesday’s elections, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh told listeners the outcomes wouldn’t even have been close if the GOP paid more attention to its tea party base.
Limbaugh was reacting to a Politico piece posted Monday, “Mainstream GOP Sees Tipping Point vs. Insurgent Candidates,” that aimed to explain Republicans expected successes Tuesday as a victory for the party’s “establishment,” structure.
National Republicans managed this year to snuff out every bomb-throwing insurgent who tried to wrest a Senate nod away from one of their favored candidates…
The confrontational approach, by both party committees and outside super PACs, represented a sharp departure from the GOP’s cautious strategy in the 2010 and 2012 cycles, when cartoonishly inept nominees aligned with the tea party lost the party as many as five Senate seats.
So it was the Republican national party turning its back on the tea party that set the table for victory on Tuesday?
Wrong, Limbaugh said.
It was the tea party, vast and unorganized but deeply committed, that kept the conservative cause alive and thriving long before the rest of the country or the GOP establishment got a handle on the results of Barack Obama’s 2008 victory and liberal Democrats control of the House, Senate and White House.
And if Republicans win the midterm electoral victories that are being predicted, it will be in spite of the national party’s efforts to distance itself from the base that kept it alive in the first place. Had the national party been even open to what Politico describes as “insurgents” in the GOP ranks, it would have been seeing even more success, Limbaugh said.
And if the Republican Party had embraced the most amazing political event of our lifetime, and that’s the rise of the Tea Party… ah, you might want to say the fall of the Berlin Wall, but that also had foreign policy connotations. But out of nowhere this massive political movement rises. Out of nowhere in 2010 it arises precisely because of its opposition to the Democrat president, the Democrat Party, and what they are doing to the country, and to this day the Republican Party has refused to embrace it. In fact, it’s the opposite.
They’ve attempted to diminish and impugn the Tea Party to the point now we’ve got a Politico story, which says that the real thing the Republicans are gonna celebrate if they take the Senate is not taking the Senate but vanquishing the idea that the Tea Party is needed for Republicans to win.
As usual, Rush is right.
Of course there were primary fights between Republicans, that’s what primaries are for. But none of the Republicans in competitive races Tuesday had the luxury of turning their backs on the tea party movement.
Nor should they, even if election politics were different this year. The goal, after all, is not winning intra-Republican disputes. And it’s not winning elections just for the sake of winning elections in 2016. The goal is repairing some of the damage wrought over the past six years by the victory of “hope and change” illusions in 2008.
And that’s going to mean the tea party movement is more important even than it was before – no matter what GOP sources might be telling lefty news website reporters inside the Beltway.
“It’s not about stopping the tea party, for crying out loud!” Limbaugh said. “It’s about stopping Obama.”
It has been since Day One. And the tea party knew it long before the “mainstream” GOP did.
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Posted: 05 Nov 2014 07:13 AM PST


The Obama administration “has no foreign policy,” says Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP’s 2012 vice-presidential candidate.
While we may tune out this kind of election year rhetoric, similar complaints, no matter which president is being denounced, are common on both sides of the aisle. When the Democrats are in power we hear it from Republicans, and when the GOP is in the saddle we hear similar accusations arising from the Democrats. The reality, however, is that the leaders of both parties know perfectly well that we do in fact have a remarkably consistent policy, one that has been pursued with increasing militancy ever since the end of the cold war.
Let’s step back and take a look.
No sooner had the Berlin Wall fallen than George Herbert Walker Bush took the opportunity to make his move in the Middle East with Iraq War I. Declaring the throne of the Emir of Kuwait to be a vital national interest of the United States, Bush I declared “this shall not stand” when Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq’s “nineteenth province,” otherwise known as Kuwait. It’s time for a “new world order,” Bush famously declared – and Washington’s push for world hegemony was on.
Bill Clinton kept up the pressure on Iraq for the whole of his presidency, launching punishing bombing raids and imposing sanctions that killed many thousands. A new front was opened up in Europe, where the Bosnian Muslims and their Kosovar neighbors were pimped out to the Americans: a short war made short work of the former Yugoslavia, and US-occupied Europe grew a little larger. This aggression was buttressed by the addition of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to the NATO alliance, as the US and its satellites pushed right up to the gates of Moscow.
Less obvious but no less obtrusive, the Clinton regime set up a special government agency to exploit the oil resources of the Caspian Basin, extending the encirclement of Russia into the steppes of Central Asia.
And while the second Bush administration is often blamed for Iraq War II, the fact is that the legislation funding the Iraqi National Congress – and setting the stage for the biggest military disaster in US history – was enacted by the Clinton administration. The “Iraq Liberation Act” was the Clintons’ baby, but both parties jumped on the bandwagon. Only 38 members of Congress voted against it in the House: it was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate – and the road to chaos in the Middle East was cleared.
The Great Leap Forward for the American Empire came in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: Afghanistan and Iraq were conquered in short order, and a long occupation was begun. On the European front, NATO expansion continued apace under George W. Bush, with the addition of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. It was quite an achievement: a mere fifteen years after the Soviet implosion and the whole of Europe was prostrate under the American heel.
The Obama administration extended the biggest expansionist push in the history of the world into North Africa with the regime change operation in Libya, and later Syria. Somalia was attacked, our alliance with the murderous ruler of Ethiopia was buttressed, and Africom was beefed up considerably in anticipation of future interventions. Iraq, which had temporarily slipped out of our fingers, was re-invaded. And on the European front, a regime change operation in Ukraine, where US-funded sock-puppets and their neo-Nazi allies overthrew a democratically elected government by force and staged a confrontation with the Russians. Nor is that the end of it: don’t forget the “Asian pivot,” an attempt to intimidate the Chinese into kowtowing to Washington by inciting its neighbors and funding “pro-democracy” demonstrators in Hong Kong.
All this from a President who had been elected as a “peace” candidate!
We don’t have a foreign policy? The idiotic Paul Ryan and the rest of the clowns who inhabit the Washington Beltway know perfectly well what our foreign policy is all about. Who could miss it? Since the demise of the Soviet Union our one aim has been the subjugation of as much of the world as we can possibly afford to gobble up, and we’re not bothering with such niceties as table manners. Chew it up and gulp it down – that, in essence, is our foreign policy.
Next on the menu: Iran and Russia, the only two big states that show any sign of resistance to the American hegemon. While it looks like President Obama would rather avoid a military confrontation with Tehran, the sincerity of the Americans and their allies in seeking a peaceful solution to the standoff over Iran’s nonexistent “nuclear weapons program” is doubtful at best. And with the Clinton Restoration waiting in the wings, the longevity of such an agreement – if it even comes to pass – is not something to bet the farm on.
Washington’s real target is and always has been Russia: with their nuclear arsenal and deep spiritual antipathy to the West, the Russians pose the biggest threat to the Americans’ unipolar conceit. In this sense, the cold war never really ended. There was a brief interruption immediately after the Soviet collapse: Boris Yeltsin’s drunken rule gave free rein to outright criminals who “privatized” Russian state assets and turned the country into an oligarchic basket case. However, the emergence of Vladimir Putin signaled an end to the looting and set the country on the road to some kind of order – and a fresh confrontation with the West.
Who or what can stop the American Borg from destroying and assimilating everything in its path? While we can’t know the future, what we can know is that such a purely destructive course cannot be indefinitely maintained. Something’s gotta give, as the old song goes: whether it’s the financial time-bomb ticking away at the heart of the American Empire or some other catastrophe, natural or man-made. For the sake of the long suffering peoples of the earth, let’s hope it comes sooner rather than later.
Justin Raimondo is an American author and the editorial director of Antiwar.com
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Posted: 05 Nov 2014 07:05 AM PST


Government requests for Facebook user data shot up nearly a quarter worldwide in the first six months of 2014 over the second half of last year, a biannual report from the company reveals. Over 40 percent of those requests originated in the United States.
Between January and June of this year, governments made 34,946 requests for data globally. During the same period, the amount of Facebook content restricted at the behest of local authorities rose by 19 percent.
In September, Google noted a 15 percent uptick in the number of government requests related to criminal investigations in the first six months of 2014. At that time, the company noted the number of such requests had jumped 150 percent over five years.
While Facebook’s deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby said that the firm pushes “back hard” when data requests are made, Facebook was legally required to hand over some data in roughly 80 percent of the abovementioned cases.
Meanwhile, approximately 15,433 of government data requests targeting 23,667 individual accounts came from the US. In contrast, 11-12,000 requests were made in the previous six-month period. In 80.5 percent of those cases, Facebook handed over some data – in line with the global average. Those numbers, however, could actually be higher, as Facebook must abide by a six-month gag order before reporting the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests.


Facebook was able to release the number of FISA and NSL requests for the second half of 2013, although those figures remain vague as the social media giant is legally required to report such requests in bands of 1,000.
Since neither FISA nor NSL requests exceeded 1,000 for that period, the total number of requests in both categories stand anywhere between zero and 999.


The latest report comes as Facebook struggles with the largest bulk search warrant request in company history, after a judge in New York asked the Internet giant to turn over data for 381 people last year.
Facebook claimed the request, which seeks, among other things, photographs and private messages, violates the privacy of its users.
“We’ve argued that these overly broad warrants violate the privacy rights of the people on Facebook and ignore constitutional safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures,” Sonderby said on Tuesday. “Despite a setback in the lower court, we’re aggressively pursuing an appeal to a higher court to invalidate these sweeping warrants and to force the government to return the data it has seized.”
That case is currently awaiting a decision by a New York appellate court due by year’s end.
More broadly, Facebook says it is ramping up industry and civil society efforts to push governments to be more transparent and reform surveillance practices in order “to rebuild people’s trust in the internet.”
Facebook noted its efforts to lobby Congress to accept the USA Freedom Act, which aims to end the bulk collection of Americans’ metadata and end the secret laws created by the FISA court.
Facebook’s attempts to narrow the scope and proportionality of government data requests mirror public concerns regarding the scope of US government surveillance in the wake of the 2013 Global Surveillance disclosures.
Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who revealed the scope and depth of government snooping, recently said Facebook was still a “dangerous service” despite its efforts to improve user privacy protection.
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Posted: 04 Nov 2014 01:40 PM PST


Two Air Force nuclear commanders have been fired, with a third facing disciplinary measures, after the service cited a “loss of confidence” in their ability to lead their units, once again drawing attention to troubles within the US nuclear corps.
The terminations come as the Air Force continues to reckon with leadership problems. Earlier this year, nine nuclear commanders were fired in connection to a test-cheating scandal, which implicated dozens of missile launch officers.
Col. Carl Jones, the No. 2 commander of the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, was the most high-profile of the two commanders to be dismissed on Monday. Jones was responsible for 150 Minuteman 3 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles – the Air Force has 450 total – but his superiors determined there was “a loss of trust and confidence in his leadership abilities.”
According to Air Force Global Strike Command spokesman Lt. Col. John Sheets, Jones displayed conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman, as well as mistreatment of those below his rank.
“In four separate instances, Jones acted in a manner that degraded his status as a senior officer and wing leader, including maltreating a subordinate,” Sheets told AP.
Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Jimmy “Keith” Brown was also fired due to questions over his leadership, with Sheets saying he “engaged in unlawful discrimination or harassment.” Brown apparently “made statements to subordinates that created a perception within his squadron that pregnancy would negatively affect a woman’s career.”
Finally, Col. Michael Pagliuco, commander of the 91st Operations Group, was disciplined for failing to “promote and safeguard the morale, well-being and welfare of the airmen under his command.” Details of his punishment were not released.
Based on the statements made by Sheets, it is unclear if the latest round of discipline meted out by the Air Force is directly related to the cheating scandal that erupted last year and claimed the job of its top commander. At the heart of the matter was that officers were texting each other the answers to the exams they needed to pass.
Back in January, some 34 nuclear missile launch officers were implicated in the scandal and stripped of their security clearance. In March, nine nuclear missile base commanders were fired. They were not found to be explicitly involved in the cheating, but they were let go for failing their leadership responsibilities.
“There was cheating that took place with respect to this particular test. Some officers did it. Others apparently knew about it, and it appears that they did nothing, or at least not enough, to stop it or to report it,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in January.
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Posted: 04 Nov 2014 11:50 AM PST


At least a dozen people have been killed and hundreds of others remain missing following heavy rains that caused a massive landslide in central Sri Lanka.
Rescue workers have begun their search for more than 300 people who are either missing or unaccounted for after the huge landslide hit the village of Koslanda Wednesday morning.
Koslanda is located some 200 kilometers east of the capital, Colombo.
“The area where the landslide has been reported was mostly occupied by tea estate laborers. It is most of them who have been reported missing,” said Sarath Lal Kumara, a spokesman for the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Center (DMC).
Residents in the surrounding villages have been ordered to evacuate the area as search operations continue.
Around 500 soldiers have been dispatched to assist the affected, said Major General Mano Perera.
Meanwhile, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has directed the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of Disaster Management to allocate additional relief teams to help in the search and rescue operations.
Residents and aid workers expressed grief at the widespread devastation amid fears that the death toll could be much higher.
Sri Lanka has experienced massive landslides and monsoon rains in recent years.
In 2011, flooding killed over a dozen people and displaced more than one million others in many parts of the country.
Landslides and floods also killed nearly 20 people and forced more than 150,000 others from their homes in the southern districts of Galle and Kalutara, the southeastern districts of Kegalla and Ratnapura and the central hilly areas in 2008.
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Posted: 04 Nov 2014 11:44 AM PST


A voting machine in Bexar Co., Texas, shows everyone on the ballot running for governor except Republican Greg Abbott, the favorite to win the election.
In place of Abbott’s name, the voting machine at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Antonio displays outgoing Lt. Governor David Dewhurst instead, who’s not even in the race, further fueling concerns over the accuracy of electronic voting.
“At best someone needs to be fired for this, at worst jailed,” one Twitter user commented after a screenshot of the ballot was posted on Twitter.
Unfortunately, when voting machines do get the ballot right, they can still flip votes due to software issues or even through tampering.
For example, a North Carolina voter had to make his selection four times before the machine he was using recorded his vote correctly.
“Percy Bostick, 69, of Greensboro said he tried casting a vote for Democrat Kay Hagan at the Old Guilford County Courthouse, only to have the machine register Republican Thom Tillis as his choice,” reported North Carolina’s News-Record on Saturday.
And during early voting last week in Chicago, Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan tried to vote for himself but the voting machine cast a vote for his opponent instead.
“You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat,” he said.
Even after resetting the ballot, the machine continued to cast votes for Democratic Party candidates, which an election official blamed on a “calibration error.”
But electronic voting machines can be easily hacked.
“The non-partisan and highly respected government agency, the Government Accountability Office, verified that the electronic voting machines used in 2004 were wide open to fraud, and that fraud likely occured in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, and other states,” reported Washington’s Blog. “The security flaws in electronic voting machines are so complete that anyone can instantaneously install software which will change the vote counts.”
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