Tuesday 29 October 2013

The European Union Times

Ocean used to wash Martian shores: Russian scientists

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 02:03 PM PDT

This 23 March, 2004 NASA Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows a crater in Utopia Planitia on Mars.

There used to be an ocean on Mars about three billion years ago and its remains can still be observed, Russian scientists said.
“Our studies have shown that an ocean existed in the Utopia Planitia region on the Red Planet,” Mikhail Ivanov from Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences told ITAR-TASS news agency.
The glaciation of the ocean began during the Hesperian Period, which lasted on Mars about 3.5 – 2.9 billion years ago, the planetologist said.
“At that time, according to our hypothesis, the planet had constant hydrosphere and in the Utopia Planitia region there was an ocean, which was a rounded basin of impact origin,” he explained.
According to Ivanov, the evidence, which proves the existence of an ocean on Mars, are the huge muddy whirls in the Utopia Planitia, distinctive terrain and readings obtained from research vehicles.
The Utopia Planitia is the largest recognized impact basin – formed by a collision with another celestial body – in the solar system, with an estimated diameter of 3300 kilometers.
The Hesperian Period is also characterized by the appearance of lava fields, which began covering with ice, and that might’ve caused the glaciation of the Martian ocean, he added.
The scientist also said that there are reasons to believe that a biosphere existed on the Red Planet during the period as formations similar to fossilized remains of microorganisms were discovered in three meteorites of Martian origin.
In June, NASA’s Opportunity rover discovered traces of water on the Red Planet, confirming earlier finding by the Curiosity research vehicle.
The robot analyzed clay like formation on the Martian surface, which could only be formed in the presence of a large amount of water, which the US researchers described as neutral and nearly fresh.
But the US rovers are still unable to discover methane gas on Mars, which would prove that life used to exist on the planet.
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Brazil president censures ‘NSA spying on Merkel’

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 01:57 PM PDT

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has censured alleged spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone communications.
“Nobody, no democratic nation, will permit this violation of sovereignty and human and civil rights,” Rousseff said on Thursday, adding, “There will be a growing reaction” from countries targeted by the spying scandal.
The Brazilian president further rejected the US justification that the spying was conducted for fighting terrorism, saying it “does not fit in my case, and neither do I think it fits in the case of the monitoring of (Merkel’s) cell phone.”
On Wednesday, the German leader called US President Barack Obama after learning that the NSA may have monitored her and demanded “an immediate and comprehensive explanation” from the US administration.
Rousseff herself has been the victim of NSA spying. On September 1, Brazil’s Globo television network said that the NSA spied on emails, phone calls and text messages of Brazil’s president.
The US spying revelations on Brazil have greatly strained the relationship between the two countries and caused Rousseff to cancel last month a visit to Washington.
Brazil has announced that it plans to bypass the US-centric internet, with measures including storing data locally and to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and all the South American nations in order to create a network free of US surveillance.
Rousseff spoke recently at the United Nations General Assembly, calling for international regulations on data privacy and limiting espionage programs targeting the Internet.
Germany, France and several other countries have also expressed concerns about US spying after American surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed classified information about US surveillance programs.
Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, admitted in July that Snowden’s exposés have seriously damaged US ties with other countries. “There has been damage. I don’t think we actually have been able to determine the depth of that damage.”
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As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 01:50 PM PDT

In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA’s director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted.
The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of “selling” his agency’s documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden.
“I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn’t make sense,” Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department’s “Armed With Science” blog.
“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on,” the NSA director declared.
There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and many tens of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to the agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about this thing called “the first amendment”.
I’d love to know what ways, specifically, General Alexander has in mind for empowering the US government to “come up with a way of stopping” the journalism on this story. Whatever ways those might be, they are deeply hostile to the US constitution – obviously. What kind of person wants the government to forcibly shut down reporting by the press?
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Netanyahu, world’s biggest hypocrite: former Louisiana Representative

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 01:33 PM PDT

Press TV has conducted an interview with David Duke, former member of the House of Representatives, about Iran’s deputy ambassador to the UN warning Netanyahu against any miscalculation by planning to attack Iran in response to Netanyahu’s threat of acting alone to stop Iran nuclear program.
What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: First of all, what do you make of the recent comments made by Netanyahu where he is threatening even military action against Iran despite being the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East?
Duke: I think he is the biggest hypocritical so-called national leader in the world. It is unbelievable that he could stand up before the United Nations and the world and talk about Iran’s nuclear program when he is seating on hundreds of nuclear weapons, horrific biological weapons including all kinds of viruses that are ethnically targeted according to the Times and sources from Israel and on chemical weapons.
The United States of America, the National Intelligence Estimate in my country which is made up of the top intelligence agencies – America has in fact not just one intelligence agency and not just the CIA but many agencies – and this takes the top agencies of America over a dozen and they issued a former report saying that Iran does not have any nuclear … program, period!
So it is just insane to think about an Israeli leader with nuclear weapons trying to argue for sanctions and repression and even attacks. In fact some in Israel even suggested to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
The hypocrisy is amazing but I can tell you something I am very hardened in one way but that I think the world now is seeing Zio-hypocrisy in all of its glory, in all of its clarity and the Zio-media does not know exactly how to handle it because they do not like this process.
It is not simply the government of United States that they dominate in terms of our policies. They dominate our media, they dominate the campaign financing the Republican Democratic Party, they dominate the finances of the country, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and of course the Federal Reserve which impacts every currency in the world. They dominate these things but they are finally, the people of the world are finally seeing the truth and the hypocrisy that exists in the Israeli at the Zionist position compared to Iran and compared with the rest of the world.
Press TV: Well speaking of which, looking at the response from the Iranian side where the representative to the UN has said, that he has warned in fact Netanyahu against any miscalculation by planning to attack Iran, do you think this lack of this hypocrisy and this awareness on the part of the world now as far as Israel goes will count towards this miscalculation on Israel’s part?
Duke: I do not know. What Netanyahu basically said specifically, that if he would stand from meaning that he was definitely implying that Israel was going to strike Iran with a violent attack and of course to attack nuclear reactors.
These are, your program in Iran of course is for the production of legal nuclear usage for energy, for electricity. You have uranium in your country and you certainly want to process it. You do not want your country be held hostage by other nations and all signors of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty have a right to enrich uranium so they can use it as fuel.
And there is no proof, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has stepped beyond that boundary and even the United States government intelligence community admits this.
But there is a big disconnect between that and the average thinking on the street because so much of the media, not all of it certainly, but so much of media is so heavily influenced by Zionists who own much the conglomerates of the world’s five largest conglomerates.
Zionists directly own four of the five and as the Times, the Jewish Times Los Angeles has said that the other one is owned by Murdoch but even that one is more pro-Zionist as perhaps pro-Zionist as the other four.
So the five largest media conglomerates in the world are all putting up this kind of garbage or suggesting and that is the basis of the sanctions. The basis of the sanctions against Iran are the idea that Iran is making nuclear …
The truth is the only country that should be facing sanctions right now is not Iran, it is certainly not Syria, it is Israel. Israel is a nation founded on ethnic cleansing, massacres of people, driving people out of their homes, not allowing them to return to their homes.
Israel has committed terrorism year after year, day after day in fact in all of the world assassinations, murders. They have been involved in a course of lot of the bombings and everything in Iran itself and all over the Middle East and there is certainly a lot of evidence that Israel had a lot of foreknowledge at least foreknowledge about 9/11. Their fingerprints are all over 9/11.
Israel also attacked the USS Liberty, American ship in the Mediterranean and you have talked to the members of Liberty, the men who served in Liberty, they know the evidence. Israel purposely attacked this American ship, they were going to do a false flag operation.
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NSA scandal shows Europe would be better off without Britain

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 01:00 PM PDT

Like the curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime in the classic Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze, the most revealing thing about the latest NSA spying revelations which made world headlines last week was the non-barking of the UK.
While leading politicians of other European countries and officers of the EU itself were keen to express their concern over the latest revelations of US spying on its allies – the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz said that US secret services were ‘out of control’ – British Prime Minister David Cameron has only said that he thought that the EU statement on the matter was ‘good and sensible’ and that he agreed with it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Cameron ‘silently acquiesced” to the statement. At a press conference, Cameron refused to comment about the recent NSA revelations.
The muted British reaction to what is a truly outrageous scandal, is proof, if indeed any further proof were needed, of what Britain’s main role in the EU is: to act as a Trojan horse to defend and further the interests of the government of the United States of America.
The great French leader Charles de Gaulle twice vetoed Britain’s application to join the EEC (European Economic Community), (the forerunner to today’s EU) not because he was anti-British but because he feared that allowing Britain to join would tantamount to letting America in. In January 1963, he famously declared that allowing Britain to join would lead to a “colossal Atlantic community dependent on and led by America, which would soon absorb the European Community.”
The irony is that the UK political elite today is far more slavishly pro-US than our leaders were in the 1960s. Back then British Prime Ministers did stand up to America from time to time, even though we were still paying back war-debt to the US. Labour’s Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to Vietnam. The Conservative Edward Heath defied pressure from the US to stay neutral during the 1973 Yom Kippur War between the Arab states and Israel and imposed an arms embargo on all combatants. In sharp contrast with today’s Conservative party leadership, Heath refused to allow US intelligence gathering from British bases in Cyprus.
Today, however, Britain’s leaders are totally subservient to Washington.
In fact loyalty to the American Empire and an unquestioning commitment to Atlanticism has become a necessary condition for anyone wanting to climb to the top of the greasy pole in British politics or gain entry into the UK establishment. Stated support for the US’s closest Middle East ally, Israel, is a big help too.
Any politicians who want Britain to be genuinely independent of the US and follow its own foreign policy path, like Tony Benn, who stood for deputy leadership of the Labour Party in the early 1980s, or George Galloway, the leader of Respect, have faced years of smears and attacks- and are routinely portrayed by the UK political elite and media gatekeepers as dangerous ‘extremists’.
But the real ‘extremists’ are those UK neocon Atlanticists who enthusiastically supported Britain’s role in the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq – a war based on a blatant lie about WMDs, and which according to a new study, has led to the death of nearly 500,000 people.
It’s embarrassing to see just how far ambitious British politicians are willing to go to suck up to the super-power. In 2010, WikiLeaks exposed how leading members of the Conservative Party, when in opposition, had pledged their allegiance to the US Empire and offered ‘unparalleled help’ in promoting American aims, if and when they took power.
Even the American diplomats were amused at just how sycophantic the Brits were.
The British government, full of loyal Atlanticists, will now be doing all it can to make good its promises and prevent the latest spying crisis having any long-term consequences.
Cameron had no option but to ‘silently acquiesce’ to the EU statement, but don’t expect any vocal criticism of Uncle Sam‘s snooping on its allies from the country that’s helped that snooping. Britain will be working flat out to block any beefing up of EU data protection laws and the British government will do all it can to make sure the EU/US free trade deal goes ahead. The importance of the role of the UK in speaking up for American interests in Europe is fully appreciated in Washington.
“We welcome an outward-looking EU with Britain in it. We want to see a strong British voice in that European Union. That is in the American interest,” declared Philip Gordon, US assistant secretary for European affairs, earlier this year.
We hear a lot in the UK on whether Britain should pull out of the EU. There’s certainly a strong case for saying that the EU would be much better off without its American Trojan horse.
Although there are some hardcore Atlanticists in other European countries too, without Britain there’d be more of a chance of Europe edging away from its close relationship with the US. While everyone acknowledges the role that the US, along with Britain and the Soviet Union, played in defeating the Nazis and liberating Europe in the 1940s, it’s hard to think of any benefits for Europe that the alliance with the US has brought it in the past 20 years. Since the end of the ‘Cold War’, Europe has been dragged into US-led wars and European citizens have been put at risk from terrorism due to aggressive neocon-inspired US foreign policy.
There are plenty of examples where European countries have acted against their best interests in caving in to US pressure. In 2012, an EU-wide oil embargo on Iran was imposed – the one thing that European countries didn’t need with so many economies deep in recession. The move made the US government happy, and made the pro-Israel lobby in the US happy, but it made European citizens worse off – particularly in Greece, Spain and Italy, countries which imported a sizeable proportion of their oil from Iran.
The latest example of Britain pushing the US cause in Europe came only this summer, when the UK, supported by the ‘liberal interventionists’ in France, bullied the EU into lifting its arms embargo on the Syrian opposition. Again, in what way is working to forcibly toppling a secular Middle Eastern government – which has never threatened Europe and which is fighting against extremist Islamic terrorist groups – in the interests of Europe and its citizens?
Hopefully these new spying revelations will lead to a reset in US/EU relations, which would greatly benefit ordinary people in Europe and the US.
The biggest obstacle to this happening, however, is Britain, the country whose job it is to make sure that the EU stays loyal to Washington, regardless of the harm this does to Europe.
Fifty years on from his first veto of Britain’s application to join the EEC, Charles de Gaulle’s fears have proved to be very well-founded.
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US food corporations fueling obesity epidemic with addictive ingredients

Posted: 27 Oct 2013 03:56 PM PDT

By 2030, more than half of Americans could be obese, taxing the nation’s health while costing the country $500 billion in lost economic productivity. The food industry, however, is doing its best to keep the public hooked – no matter what the price.
With one out of three adults clinically obese and 40 percent of children officially overweight, the US is the fattest country in the developed world. The burgeoning public health crisis will see instances of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer skyrocket over the next two decades, taking an already strained healthcare system to breaking point.
But with food manufacturers keen on keeping customers loyal while maximizing their profits, public health concerns are likely to be dwarfed by the bottom line.
“What these food scientists have done is that they’ve gone to a lab and they’ve created these chemical concoctions that are very sweet, very fatty and very salty. And they call that the bliss point. Meaning they’ve created addictive foods that are going to get consumers hooked and they’re going to keep wanting to come back for more and more foods,” Elizabeth Kucinich, of Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine, told RT.
And while critics might also point toward issues of self-control, the foods which are least healthy are also the cheapest, although this reality is more a failure of government policy than an inevitability.
In 1980, no one had even heard of high-fructose corn syrup. But agricultural subsidies highly distorted market prices, bringing about the rise of cheap corn, which is a staple of highly processed foods like soft drinks and much of what one finds on the supermarket shelves.
Between 1985 and 2010, the price of beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup fell 24 percent in real terms, with American children consuming on average an extra 130 calories daily from soft drinks.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a 2010 Princeton University study found that rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained substantially more weight than those with access to table sugar, even if their overall caloric intake was equal.
However, a plan by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to limit soda drinking cups to 16 ounces, for example, was met with derision, even when the public health benefits of such a ban were obvious.
And it’s not just corn. Casein, a milk protein commonly used in processed foods, also has addictive qualities that lead to overeating.
“Milk protein… casein, when it breaks down in our digestive system, turns into casomorphin, [which] is relative to morphine – the drug,” Kenneth Kendrick, a whistleblower and food safety advocate, told RT. “It gives us a little stimulation in our brain and gives us a little bit of pleasure.”
Kendrik said the reason why food in the US is both addictive and laden with fat, sugar and salt is simple.
“In one word, I would say: greed. We obviously are putting money above public health,” he said. “Just like with cigarettes, we want to keep people addicted. I equate it to what the cigarette industry did. They deliberately wanted to put things in that were addictive because that drives sales and will continue to drive generations of sales.”
But as savvy and unrestrained marketing campaigns allow corporations full rein to market their products to the US public, the defeat of California’s Proposition 37, which would have required the labeling of all food products containing genetically modified organisms, proves that they want full control over the narrative about what US consumers are putting into their bodies.
“While European countries require genetically modified foods to be labelled, in the US the biotech industry and corporations like Pepsi Co. and Coca Cola spent millions last year to defeat the California ballot initiative for GMO genetically modified organism labeling,” Kucinich said.
It is this perfect storm of labeling control, addictive food additives and shockingly effective marketing that has America on course for an epidemic of monumental proportions.
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Ecuador to sue UK at international courts over Assange case

Posted: 27 Oct 2013 03:48 PM PDT

Julian Assange giving a speech from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on August 19, 2012

Ecuador has threatened to launch a legal action against Britain over the status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if London rejects a bilateral commission proposal.
In an interview with the South American country’s public radio on Friday, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said Quito will have no “alternative” but to go to international tribunals if the UK government rejects a proposal to submit the case of the Australian activist to a bilateral commission.
He also urged the British government to “respect Ecuador’s right to grant asylum” and allow Assange safely travel to the Latin American country.
“We are hoping for a response, including one in writing, from (the British) and if they do not do so in a few days we will have to prepare an international suit so that the United Kingdom respects international law,” the top Ecuadorian diplomat said.
Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012 and has secured political asylum from the South American country after he lost a legal battle against extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning over the sexual abuse allegations.
It is believed that Assange’s extradition to the North European country is a cover for sending him to the US, where he is wanted over the release of thousands of US’ classified documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on his whistleblower website.
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Captain America Battles DHS In New Film

Posted: 27 Oct 2013 03:34 PM PDT

Alex’s take on the new Captain America film in which Captain America battles the shadow government that is staging attacks to convince the American people to give up their liberties.

Israel intercepted millions of French calls

Posted: 27 Oct 2013 03:27 PM PDT

A leaked US intelligence document has revealed that Israel is behind the hacking of millions of phone calls and messages in France.
According to a report by Le Monde on Friday Israeli agents is behind a cyber attack against the communications networks of the Elysee Palace, intercepting more than 70 million calls and text messages a month.
France had initially accused the US of hacking into former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s communications network during the 2012 presidential election.
Senior French intelligence officials visited the US earlier this year to discuss the attempt to hack into the Elysee communication system.
However, according to a classified documents dated April 2013, which was leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, the agency denied the allegation and reportedly hinted that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, had been involved in the attack.
The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) that handles cyber attacks denied the allegations and said the US closest allies, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand were also not involved, the document reportedly noted.
After the World War Two, the US signed a “no-spying” deal with Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, known as the “Five Eyes” alliance.
“TAO intentionally did not ask either Mossad or (Israel’s cyber intelligence unit) ISNU whether they were involved as France is not an approved target for joint discussions,” extracts from the document published by Le Monde read.
The report comes amid outrage over claims the US has been monitoring the telephone conversations of 35 world leaders.
“A US official provided NSA with 200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders… Despite the fact that the majority is probably available via open source, the PCs [intelligence production centers] have noted 43 previously unknown phone numbers. These numbers plus several others have been tasked,” said the classified document provided by Snowden.
Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
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