Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday 13 November 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 12 Nov 2015 03:14 AM PST

The middle class in America has been disappearing because of the rapid increase in the cost of living in the United States.
Indeed, the cost of living in the United States (food, rent, medical insurance and so on) has been growing rapidly. On the federal level, the poverty threshold for a family of five makes up $28,410, although 51% of all American workers make less than $ 30,000 a year at the moment.
In the US, the number of employed, yet poor individuals has been growing rapidly. The rising cost of health insurance is one of the most unpleasant things that Americans have to face in their every day lives. Barack Obama promised that his program would reduce health insurance by $ 2,500 for a family, but the cost of premiums has grown by $4,865 since 2008.
Food prices have become 3.9 percent more expensive, thus marking the biggest rise since July 2012. According to the US Census Bureau, nearly 47 million Americans live in poverty right now. In 2007, approximately one out of every eight children in the US was receiving food stamps. Today, the index has grown to one of every five.
Experts point out that there are 1.5 million households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. This number has doubled since 1996. Forty-six million Americans use food banks each year.
The number of homeless children in the United States has increased by 60 percent in the last six years. Approximately 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter, or in a similar facility, at least once last year.
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Posted: 12 Nov 2015 03:07 AM PST

On Sunday France announced it had bombed an oil supply center held by ISIS near Deir Ezzor in Syria.
“We intervened in Syria… yesterday evening with a strike on an oil supply center near Deir Ezzor on the border between Iraq and Syria,” French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Monday.
The Syrian Army, backed up Russian airstrikes, have made significant progress taking back the Deir Ezzor province from the Islamic State and al-Nusra.
The city of Deir Ezzor is Syria’s sixth-largest city and the country’s oil capital. Destroying oil infrastructure there will seriously cripple the Syrian economy and the government’s war against U.S. and Gulf Emirate backed mercenaries.
Maram Susli notes destroying Syria’s oil infrastructure is not an effective way to prevent ISIS from hijacking oil and selling it on the black market.
If the U.S. and France were sincerely interested in shutting down the ISIS black market oil business, they would target convoys transporting the oil.
“If the US truly intended to stop ISIS oil profits, they would bomb these oil convoys, which are easily spotted via conventional surveillance flights already allegedly taking place as part of ongoing Western operations,” Susli writes.
“The US agenda behind destroying Syria’s pipelines has very little to do with ISIS oil profits, and far more to do with destroying Syria’s oil infrastructure.”
Targeting Syria’s Civilian Infrastructure
In mid-October the U.S. targeted the Syrian electrical grid when it conducted airstrikes against two power plants under the control of ISIS in the al-Rudwaniya area to the east of Aleppo.
Following the attack on the 1,000 megawatt thermal plant, the U.S. coalition attacked civilian infrastructure in Mare’a, Tal Sha’er, and al-Bab in the Aleppo countryside.
The Syrian government and ISIS have an informal agreement “of understanding [that] pertains to the division of the electricity supply between the parties, whereby ISIS will receive 60% of the quota and the Syrian regime will receive 40%.”
“The electricity generation and distribution system is civil infrastructure. It is used and useful to everyone no matter what side of the conflict,” the blog Moon of Alabama noted on October 19.
Without the plant Aleppo city, with some 2-3 million inhabitants and refugees, as well as the surrounding areas in Aleppo governate have no electricity. The damage the U.S. bombing caused will make sure that any repair will take a long time. This will make life for people on every side of the war more unbearable and more people will leave to seek refuge in foreign countries.
Airstrikes of US-led coalition on civilian facilities in the Syrian territory lead to increasing refugee flows to the European Union, Russian General Staff Andrey Kartapolov explained after the the strike on the Aleppo electrical plant.
War Crimes Under the Geneva Conventions
Targeting civilian infrastructure is a preferred tactic used by the United States.
In Libya, NATO bombed the country’s irrigation system. The system transported water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70% of the population.
The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
During the invasion of Iraq in 1991, the U.S. military targeted the civilian electrical power generation system. The damaged power infrastructure was re-targeted during the 2003 invasion.
In addition to the electrical system in Iraq, the U.S targeted telephone and radio exchanges, relay stations, towers and transmission facilities, food processing, storage and distribution facilities and markets, railroad transportation facilities, bus depots, bridges, highway overpasses, highways, sewage treatment and disposal systems and even historical markers and ancient sites.
In 2001 Thomas J. Nagy “discovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country’s water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.”
NATO and the U.S. replicated this pattern during the bombardment of the former Yugoslavia. During the campaign, NATO bombed hospitals, schools, daycare centers, food warehouses, civilian homes, and world cultural heritage sites, including churches and monasteries.
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Posted: 12 Nov 2015 02:31 AM PST

Scientists believe they have figured out why rocks on Mars are eroding. They say an acidic fog created by volcanic eruptions on the red planet is the probable culprit.
Planetary scientist Shoshanna Cole came up with the theory after studying a 100-acre area on Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills of the Gusev Crater on Mars using data gathered by a number of instruments on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.
She found that acidic vapors released by eruptions may have been responsible for eating away rocks on the Watchtower Class outcrops on the Cumberland Ridge and Husband Hill summit.
“The special thing about Watchtower Class is that it’s very widespread and we see it in different locations. As far as we can tell, it is part of the ground there,” which means that these rocks record environments that existed on Mars billions of years ago, Cole said in a press release submitted by the Geological Society of America.
She combined data from previous studies of the red planet and found some interesting patterns emerging. The Mars Exploration Rover Sprit had closely examined the Watchtower Class rocks at a dozen locations spanning 200 meters across the Cumberland Ridge and the Husband Hill summit.
Cole found that the chemical composition of the rocks was the same, but they looked different. Some had lost their structure and become less crystalline and more amorphous.
“So we can see the agglomerations progress in size from west to east and the iron changes in the same way,” Cole said. “It was super cool.”
The fact that the rocks had the same composition indicated to Cole that they had once been identical. “That makes us think that they were made of the same stuff when they started out. Then something happened to make them different from each other,” the scientist added.
She believes that the rocks were exposed to acidic water vapor from volcanic eruptions, which is similar to the corrosive volcanic smog or “vog” that poses dangers in Hawaii.
“When the Martian ‘vog’ landed on the surface of the rocks it dissolved some minerals, forming a gel. Then the water evaporated, leaving behind a cementing agent that resulted in the agglomerations,” Cole mentioned.
“So nothing is being added or taken away, but it was changed,” Cole said. “This would have happened in tiny amounts over a very long time. There’s even one place where you see the cementing agent healing a fracture. It’s pretty awesome. I was pretty happy when I found that one.”
The findings were presented at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting, which took place in Baltimore.
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Posted: 12 Nov 2015 01:55 AM PST

Chinese marine geologists have discovered about 500 tons of gold under the seabed in the East China Sea, local media reported.
The first undersea gold reserves and the largest gold deposit found in China was discovered after three years of investigations near Sanshan Island in east China’s Shandong province, 1.2 miles below sea level, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported Tuesday.
The new-found deposit is currently valued at over $16.4 billion and is estimated to hold at least 1,600 tons of gold, according to the newspaper.
The gold mine is located near the city of Laizhou, which is home to the largest gold deposits in the country.
In May, China proposed to India that the two countries start several joint mining projects to explore the Southern Indian Ocean’s seabeds for precious metals, including gold and silver.
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Posted: 12 Nov 2015 01:48 AM PST

The Italian government attempted to cover up the arrest of a convicted Al Qaeda terrorist who tried to enter the country on a migrant boat last month, German media claims.
According to N-TV, the arrest of Tunisian citizen Ben Nasr Mehdi, who was sentenced to seven years in 2007 for plotting multiple terror attacks, was initially hidden by authorities over fears that the news would stoke “panic” among Italians.
Mehdi, who was arrested at sea while traveling with more than 200 migrants, told police he was seeking asylum in Europe in order to escape persecution after providing a false name.
Following several days of interrogation by police, Mehdi was deported back to Tunisia and handed over to local authorities.
As noted by the Independent, the alleged attempt to cover up the arrest was likely rooted in Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano’s repeated claim that “there was no evidence that Islamic terrorists were sneaking into Europe aboard migrant boats.”
Claims of an attempted cover up are unsurprising given numerous other instances in which negative news stories have been ignored as not to empower critics of mass migration.
Just last September it was learned that police in Germany had kept quiet about an epidemic of rapes that targeted children solely because the perpetrators were Muslim migrants.
“Police are refusing to go public about crimes involving refugees and migrants because they do not want to give legitimacy to critics of mass migration,” wrote journalist Soeren Kern.
Despite warnings from countless high-level officials across the globe on the dangers of unregulated migration, Western government leaders continue to accept thousands of migrants not linked to the Syrian conflict.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 13:32