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Saturday, 13 June 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 12 Jun 2015 03:47 AM PDT


International Monetary Fund representatives have cut short negotiations with Greek officials in Brussels, after they failed to present a viable reform plan. The move has left Athens, due to repay €1.6 billion by the end June, on the edge of default.
“The ball is very much in Greece’s court,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told the media during a specially scheduled announcement, before his team returns to Washington. “There are major differences between us in most key areas. There has been no progress in narrowing these differences recently.”
With wages and pensions at 80 percent of total public spending “it’s not possible for Greece to achieve its medium-term fiscal targets without reforms, and especially of pensions.” Rice also told Athens to eschew “unsustainable” tax increases, but called on Athens to collect it’s existing VAT taxes.
Greece is carrying €320 billion ($360 billion) of external loans, but has been negotiating a cash-for-reforms deal for a €7.2 billion ($8.1 billion) tranche of a previously agreed bailout that will allow it to stave off an imminent deal.
Athens has insisted that it has presented a reform plan, while its delegation said it still believed that “intensifying negotiations” could produce a deal “in the coming days.” Its creditors have dismissed its promises as vague, and accused Greece of engaging in brinkmanship.
“There is no more space for gambling; there is no more time for gambling. The day is coming, I am afraid, that someone says the game is over,” said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, after chairing an EU-Latin America summit, which he had to leave several times to negotiate with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. “We need decisions, not negotiations now.”
“We are working to assure an agreement which will ensure that Greece will recover with social cohesion and viable public debts,” Tsipras told the media after meeting the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, shortly after talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Francois Hollande.
Tsipras was due to continue talks with Juncker on Friday, but in view of the latest impasse, it may now be postponed.
Tsipras’s Syriza party was elected in January with backing from traditional socialist voters and an overlapping group of those simply tired of endless austerity measures from Brussels. Since 2008, Greece’s GDP has collapsed by almost a third.
Now, he is experiencing discontent and pressure from both camps. On Thursday, Communist activists unveiled a giant banner with the slogan “We have bled enough, we have paid enough. Take matters in your own hands Greek people! Block the new measures and long-term bailout agreements.”
It was hung from the finance ministry building in central Athens. The banner depicted Tsipras as just another Euro-stooge, alongside his more moderate predecessors.
At the same time voters in the center, also have reason for discontent. The economy, which was inching towards a tepid recovery, has now plunged into another recession under his uncertain watch, while the latest figures show that unemployment has risen to 26.6 percent.
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Posted: 12 Jun 2015 03:31 AM PDT



Americans will likely face a domestic terror attack from disgruntled black Americans – not ISIS – for allowing racism to perpetuate, a black Texas-based civil rights organization representative said during a Tuesday press conference on the McKinney pool party controversy.
Rev. Ronald Wright, executive director of Justice Seekers Texas, told media outlets that such incidents will likely lead to ISIS-style terrorism in the country, specifically targeting law enforcement.
“We’re setting the stage for a terrorist attack in this country. And the group is not going to be ISIS, it’s going to be ‘US-IS,’ us against these unjust law officers and people who continue to allow racism to grow into this city,” Wright said.
Wright’s comments follow what has now been dubbed the “Pool Party Controversy,” an incident in which a Texas police officer drew his firearm on unarmed black teenagers before throwing a bikini-clad girl to the ground last Friday.

“He grabbed me, twisted my arm on my back and shoved me in the grass and started pulling the back of my braids,” Dajerria Becton told Fox 4. “I was telling him to get off me because my back was hurting bad.”
Witnesses to the incident claim the officer, who has since been placed on administrative leave, specifically targeted minorities after arriving on scene.
Others, such as attendee Jordan Gray, a 16-year-old black male, told CNN that although police appeared to be putting only black people on the ground, the incident had nothing to do with race.
“It’s just separate events happening,” Gray said. “It was just a young girl put on the ground against her will and that’s all it was. It was not racism. It wasn’t none of that.”
Rev. Wright’s controversial comments will likely add more fuel to an already tense situation and may attract billionaire George Soros-backed protesters, notorious for being linked to violent incidents.
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Posted: 12 Jun 2015 02:45 AM PDT


A couple in Florida were arrested and charged with felony neglect after their 11-year-old son was left alone in the back yard playing basketball for only 90 minutes. Furthermore, the child was taken from the parents and placed into foster care.
The remarkable story was related to the website Free Range Kids, which advocates raising children to be self reliant, rather than succumbing to the nanny state.
The boy found himself locked out of the family home in April, after the parents became stuck in traffic. A busy body neighbor decided that this was far too dangerous, and called the cops.
When the parents arrived home, they were put in handcuffs, strip searched, fingerprinted and subsequently held overnight in jail.
Meanwhile, the boy and his 4-year-old brother, who was not left alone at any time, were taken into the custody of police and handed to a relative.
It emerged that for 48 hours while the hand over was being sorted out, the children were only fed cereal, and were not encouraged to wash.
After a few weeks of not being able to see their kids, the couple discovered that the relative who was caring for them had had enough and was handing the children over to CPS, whose lawyers asked a judge to place the children in foster care.
When the case came to court, there was a back and forth argument between the CPS lawyer and the family’s legal representative that went on for hours. It was only when the 11-year-old boy spoke to the judge that sanity prevailed.
“He went back there and spoke to the judge for about ten minutes,” the mother told Free Range Kids.
“And then the judge came out and called the two lawyers to the bench and talked to them for about 10 or 15 minutes. And with that, our lawyer came to us and said that if we admitted that we didn’t know that it was wrong to [our son] stay in the backyard, but that we know now that it’s wrong and we will never let it happen again, and that we will explain this to our son, he would let the children come with us.”
The parents agreed to the terms and were allowed to take their children home, a month after the incident originally occurred.
The couple are now attending mandatory ‘parenting classes’ and having therapy, while the children are getting “play” therapy, and must attend mandatory day camps throughout the Summer, all at the behest of CPS.
Unlike last Summer, the kids will not be going to the beach or playing with their parents.
The parents are set to battle the felony charge in criminal court, and trying to get the entire case dropped.
As InfoWars has previously highlighted, cases like this are frequently occurring, and responsible parents who refuse to mollycoddle their children are being repeatedly targeted, and constantly living under the threat of losing their children to the State.
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Posted: 12 Jun 2015 02:01 AM PDT


Dozens of penguins have been found dead over the course of the past three days on the coast of Uruguay.
A government official announced on Thursday that the penguins were found in two separate locations.
Graciela Fabiano, an official from the National Directorate of Water Resources, told local media that the issue of the dead penguins was not an uncommon occurrence.
Some of the dead penguins were found 210 kilometers (124 miles) east of the country’s capital, Montevideo, she said.
The others, according to Fabiano, were found at a beach in the resort town of Punta del Este on the Atlantic Coast in southeastern Uruguay.
The agency has no program for monitoring the penguins, but at this time of the year it is usual for penguins to show up on shore, sometimes dead, Fabiano said, adding that the movement of the penguins is associated with their migratory patterns.
The dead birds that wash up usually succumb to natural causes, but even such scenarios should be examined anyway, she said.
According to the government official, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean were going through what she called a rough season so more dead penguins are expected to wash up on shore.
The finding has puzzled local scientists, who are attempting to find out if this was the result of an accident or a possible waterborne virus.
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