Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday, 19 November 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 18 Nov 2015 05:03 AM PST

Anti-refugee rhetoric has propelled the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to third place in the country, a fresh poll has revealed.
According to a weekly survey by INSA, AfD would have received 10.5 percent of the vote if an election was held Wednesday.
This means that the ultranationalist party has surged ahead of left-leaning parties the Greens and Die Linke (Left Party), which both registered 10 percent support.
Support for AfD appears to have skyrocketed in recent months, as they had only 3 percent in the polls as recently as August.
It is also the best result for the party, which was established in 2013 as a Eurosceptic group, but then switched to criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies.
One of the party’s key figures, Björn Höcke, has made headlines with hardline nationalist rhetoric. Some of its slogans, such as: “Germans! Three thousand years of Europe, 1,000 years of Germany,” have been compared to Nazi propaganda.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling alliance, comprising the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) remains top of the polls with 35 percent, followed by the Social Democrats (SPD) on 23.5 percent, the poll showed.
The left has blamed the CSU for creating the conditions for the growth of the AfD, saying that the conservative Bavarian party made “xenophobic slogans socially acceptable.”
The Christian Social Union has recently called for the building of border fences in response to hundreds of thousands of refugees coming to Germany from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The AfD is also profiting from the impression that people in need could overwhelm a rich country like Germany – but this is a fictitious emergency,” Katja Kipping, chair of the Left Party, told The Local. “The relevant authorities at the federal level didn’t react quickly enough to the predictable rise in refugee numbers.”
Hermann Binkert, the head of the INSA polling agency, said that the rise of the AfD can be explained by its more “authentic position in terms of refugees and migration.”
“Voters who don’t agree with [Merkel’s] CDU go to the AfD because all the other parties stand for the Willkommenskultur [Germanys’ welcoming policy toward refugees],” he said.
But Binkert was reluctant to predict whether, in the long term, the AfD would maintain its current popularity, which he said was closely tied to the refugee crisis.
“If the refugee issue were to be solved, then the central reason why people are saying they’d vote for them would also disappear,” he said.
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Posted: 18 Nov 2015 04:55 AM PST
Scientists have discovered that mealworms can safely convert plastic into CO2, nutrition for soil.
Scientists in China have found an easy solution to the big problem of non-biodegradable garbage by discovering a worm that can eat up and fully digest and degrade plastic waste.
Professor Yang Jun, from Beihang University, and Doctor Zhao Jiao, from the Shenzhen-based genomics organization BGI, have jointly proved that the larvae of Tenebrio molitor, also known as yellow mealworms, can safely biodegrade polystyrene, one of the most stubborn in the plastic family, into carbon dioxide and nutrition.
The mealworms in the study were put on a strict diet of Styrofoam. They converted about half of what they ate into carbon dioxide and the other half was turned into biodegraded droppings. The mealworms remained healthy on the plastic diet, and their droppings appeared to be safe for use as soil for crops.
Yang said global consumption of plastics had reached about 300 million tons in 2013 and about 400 million tons of plastic garbage is left untreated annually on the planet, posing a great threat to the environment, as well as food supply.
Yang started to study plastic degradation in 2005.
His team conducted tests on many insects and worms until they discovered that the bacteria in the mealworm’s gut effectively biodegrades the plastic as part of its metabolism.
The finding was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The discovery has huge potential to help reduce the environmental impact of plastic pollutants.
In nature it takes hundreds of years to biodegrade the plastic used in plastic plates, cups and containers.
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Posted: 18 Nov 2015 04:37 AM PST

Shock video illustrates the fact that Islam is the problem.
Turkish fans booed victims of the Paris attack and chanted “Allahu Akbar” during a minute’s silence, illustrating once again how “radical” Islam isn’t the problem, Islam is the problem period.

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Posted: 18 Nov 2015 04:15 AM PST
Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook answers questions from reporters.
In a departure from its previous assessments, the US Defense Department has acknowledged that Russia’s air campaign was concentrated on the Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) terrorist group in Syria.
Russia gave the US advance notice before launching airstrikes on Daesh positions in the Syrian city of Raqqah​, the group’s de facto capital, Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook said Tuesday.
“There was advance warning, giving us the opportunity if we had had aircraft in the area that we could have made adjustments,” Cook said.
Cook, however, stressed that the incident was the first in its kind and insisted that Washington is not cooperating or coordinating with Moscow in terms of targets.
The Russians used sea-launched cruise missiles and long-range bombers to target Daesh on Tuesday, according to a senior US defense official.
Russia has been conducting airstrikes on Daesh positions at the request of the Syrian government since September 30. The US has previously insisted that Russia was targeting US-allied militants.
Moscow says it has doubled the number of sorties against terrorist targets in Syria.
The latest surge in airstrikes follows Moscow’s confirmation that the country’s passenger jet that crashed over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on October 31 and killed all the 224 people on board was an act of terror.
France and Russia have also agreed to step up military cooperation to strike Daesh in Syria.
The agreement was reached following a phone conversation between French President Francois Hollande and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin announced in a statement on Tuesday.
The French warplanes carried out their first strikes against alleged Daesh positions in Raqqah on November 15, after at least 132 people were killed and 350 others injured in a series of attacks in the French capital, Paris, late on Friday.
Daesh claimed responsibility for the massacre.
US President Barack Obama acknowledged Monday that the Paris attacks were a “terrible and sickening setback” in the fight against Daesh.
Obama vowed to ramp up the military campaign in Iraq and Syria, but ruled out the possibility of deploying more US ground troops.
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Posted: 18 Nov 2015 04:01 AM PST

Nearly 20 US governors announced they would block the acceptance of thousands of migrants into their states, after at least two perpetrators of the Paris terrorist attacks were revealed to have entered France posing as refugees.
The terrorist attacks in France that killed at least 129 people and injured over 350 more came as Europe has been accepting hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing the violence in Syria. Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL) claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks on Friday.
Citing concerns that some of the attackers have posed as refugees to gain access to Europe, mostly Republican governors of at least 19 US states have said that they will do whatever they can to stop the relocation of Syrian refugees into their jurisdictions.
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas even sent a letter to President Obama informing him of the move. He said Texas had dealt with IS-affiliated attempted terror attacks within the state, and that allowing Syrian refugees to settle in his state “irresponsibly exposes our fellow Americans to unacceptable peril.”
Michigan governor Rick Snyder had originally welcomed the proposal to locate refugees into his state, which already has a large Muslim population. After Friday’s attacks in Paris, however, he said his first priority was “protecting the safety” of Michigan residents until security procedures assessing incoming refugees have been fully reviewed at a federal level.
“Michigan is a welcoming state and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,” Snyder said in the statement. “But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”
Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants and a GOP presidential hopeful, announced his decision on Monday via Twitter.
“As governor, I will oppose Syrian refugees being relocated to Arkansas,” said Republican Asa Hutchinson. He later tweeted his full statement regarding the decision:
Governor Rick Scott of Florida made public his letter to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), informing the two that Florida would be not be supporting the requests to locate Syrian refugees.
“More importantly, however, it is our understanding that the state does not have the authority to prevent the federal government from funding the relocation of these Syrian refugees to Florida even without state support,” Scott’s letter said, urging Congress to take “immediate and aggressive action” to prevent President Obama from using any federal tax dollars to settle Syrian refugees in the US.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination and is considered the moderate in that race, also said that he would resist the relocations of refugees in his state.
Other Republican governors who called for keeping refugees from their states in fear of terrorists abusing the system include Indiana’s Mike Pence, Mississippi’s Phil Bryant, Bruce Rauner of Illinois, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, North Carolina’s Pat McCrory, Arizona’s Doug Ducey, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, broke from the chorus, saying that she would not block the settlement of migrants. No Syrian refugees have been brought to South Carolina as of yet.
“These are people who have protected our troops, these are people who have been persecuted for being Christian, these are people who have been hurt because of their political beliefs, these are people who we took in because they were unsafe where they were,” Haley said.
Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire is the first Democratic governor to push back against the acceptance of refugees.
“Protecting the safety and security of our people is the first responsibility of government,” her spokesman William Hinkle told the New Hampshire Union Leader. “And the Governor has always made clear that we must ensure robust refugee screening to protect American citizens, and believes that we must know more of the facts about those who carried out the Paris terrorist attacks and have strong assurances of safety from our intelligence officials before we admit refugees from Syria into the United States.”
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who is currently running for president, is answering the call of some governors by introducing a bill that would suspend the issuance of visas to refugees from Syria and other countries except those who go through strict background checks.
Despite state governors’ political posturing, they have no legal authority to contradict the president’s wishes over immigration. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, the US president has “explicit authorization to accept foreign refugees into the United States,” according to Think Progress.
Under the act, the president may admit refugees who face “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” into the United States. The president’s power to do so is particularly robust if they determine that an “unforeseen emergency refugee situation” such as the Syrian refugee crisis exists.
The Obama administration already has plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next fiscal year. In September, 72 House Democrats wrote to the administration suggesting the country settle as many 130,000 Syrian refugees, a figure 10 times that proposed by the White House.
The fear of extremism among Syrian refugees is not unfounded. A poll published in November 2014 by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies found that 13 percent of Syrian refugees have positive or “positive to some extent” feelings towards Islamic State, the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.
Some members of the public have reacted to the attacks in a manner that made the politicians sound almost cordial.
Green Bay Packers fans at Lambeau Field interrupted a moment of silence for victims of terrorism in Paris before the team’s game on Sunday by shouting “Muslims suck!”
Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers later blasted the fans over the incident.
“It’s that kind of prejudicial ideology that puts us in the position that we’re in today as a world,” Rodgers said at a post-game press conference.
Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating multiple threats made against mosques across the US following the attacks in Paris.
“This act in France is the last straw. You’re going to f***ing die,” said a voicemail left at the Islamic Society of St. Petersburg, a Florida mosque.
Similar threats were reported at mosques in Pinellas Park, Florida and Peterborough, Ohio.
“I personally have a militia that’s going to come down to your Islamic Society of Pinellas County and firebomb you, shoot whoever’s there on sight in the head. I don’t care if they’re f***ing 2 years old or 100,” said another message.
Even some non-Muslims weren’t spared the backlash. Jubbal Vereender, a Canadian journalist and Sikh, had his selfie modified to look as if he were an Islamic terrorist. A Koran was put in place of the iPad in the original photo, and a suicide vest was added on top of his plaid shirt.
The photoshopped image was subsequently published by the Spanish newspaper La Razón, which named Vereender as “one of the terrorists” behind Friday’s attacks in Paris.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 12:19