Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday 26 June 2015

“China’s Island Building Reveals The True Power In Asia – Analysis” plus 24 more : Eurasia Review

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 03:47 PM PDT
By Adriano Marchese China’s land reclamation moves in the South China Sea may be cause for reproach, but no one will do a thing about Beijing’s island-building program beyond the huff and puff of objection. While the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has been deliberating on the Philippines’ case against Chinese expansion into the Spratly Islands, China has stated that the results will have no bearing on its behavior, and has since reclaimed over 2,000 acres of land. China...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 03:42 PM PDT
By Bhaskar Roy* On June 9 early morning, a crack team of Indian army commandos, backed by air support, attacked two camps of NSCN (Khaplang) across the Manipur border with Myanmar, inflicting some serious damage. The team returned without any loss on its side. This operation demonstrated that the Indian armed forces have developed the capacity for hot pursuit of militants and terrorists, and also can conduct precise short duration limited strikes, achieve its objectives and withdraw. The...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 03:35 PM PDT
By Mshari Al-Zaydi There have been insistent demands for the renewal of religious discourse in several Muslim countries, including Egypt, which is known as “the Mother of the World” and home to the Al-Azhar university, its highest religious authority. Ever since the toppling of Egypt’s former Muslim Brotherhood-led government, which led to a surge in terrorist attacks and pro-Brotherhood propaganda campaigns, there has been much talk about the need for religious reforms, whether inside or...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 03:33 PM PDT
By Dr. S. Chandrasekharan On 19 June, a Single bench of the Supreme Court issued an interim order temporarily halting the implementation of a deal ( called 16 point agreement) made on June 8 by the four major political parties. This ruling came in response to a writ filed by two individuals which said that according Article 138 of the Interim Constitution the issues of state restructuring-delineation of federal provinces, their numbers and names-should be decided by the Constituent Assembly...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 03:08 PM PDT
Starfish that reproduce through cloning avoid ageing to a greater extent than those that propagate through sexual reproduction. This is shown by a new research study in which researchers from the University of Gothenburg participated. The study has recently been published in the highly respected journal Heredity. In the study, researchers investigated the telomere lengths and population genetics of a starfish, Coscinasterias tenuispina. The telomeres are located at the ends of the chromosomes,...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 03:02 PM PDT
As a former colonial power, France retains considerable influence in the Middle East. France was, of course, one of the two principals (the other was Great Britain) responsible for dismembering the Ottoman empire. The division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas flowed directly from the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret understanding concluded during World War One, between Britain (represented by Colonel Sir Mark Sykes), and...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 02:50 PM PDT
By John R. Haines* For other nations, their land has fixed boundaries. For Rome, its boundaries are the boundaries of the Roman world. So, too, it seems, for the nations of the European Community, and for the Community itself. And that is the basis of the immigration crisis now raging in Hungary. When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989—Der Mauerfall to Germans—it set the two Germanys on a course to reunification eleven months later. It was in Hungary, however, where “the first stone was...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 02:42 PM PDT
In an article I wrote a year ago, the following words appeared: ‘If a child is crying and you comfort them, you will (presumably unintentionally) scare them out of feeling their sadness when, in fact, their crying is a functional response to something not working out as the child wanted and for healing from this event. The same applies to fear, anger and all other feelings. Unfortunately, if we scare a child out of feeling their natural responses to events (by ignoring, comforting,...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 02:34 PM PDT
Drones generally get a bad press but there’s far more to them than destruction and war – for example drone technology can help save lives in disaster zones reaching places that no humans can tread. Now researchers from Laval University in Canada have revealed another surprising and positive drone application – tracking the impact of climate change in the Arctic. Laval University’s Argo drone can survive in the extreme conditions of the Arctic Ocean, plunging depths of almost 2 000 metres...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 02:29 PM PDT
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dubbed “The Behemoth” bleeding from a planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous, comet-like feature is about 50 times the size of the parent star. The hydrogen is evaporating from a warm, Neptune-sized planet, due to extreme radiation from the star. This phenomenon has never been seen around an exoplanet so small. It may offer clues to how other planets with hydrogen-enveloped...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 02:24 PM PDT
Some coral populations already have genetic variants necessary to tolerate warm ocean waters, and humans can help to spread these genes, a team of scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Oregon State University have found. The discovery has implications for many reefs now threatened by global warming and shows for the first time that mixing and matching corals from different latitudes may boost reef survival. The findings were published...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 02:22 PM PDT
Conjecture about a Rosneft-Essar deal shows how the oil market dynamics have shifted in the past few years. Just as supply security is important to oil buyers, demand security is crucial for oil suppliers. Buying refining and marketing assets in big markets like India is the route to demand security for Russia, whose economy depends on petroleum exports. By Amit Bhandari* Energy trade is not just about securing supplies–it is also about securing demand. News reports suggest that Russia’s...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 02:01 PM PDT
Saudi Arabia has strongly condemned the attack that on Wednesday targeted a UAE relief convoy including the UAE ambassador in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, resulting in killing and wounding a number of innocent people. Head of the Information Department at the Foreign Ministry Osama Nugali stressed the Kingdom’s condemnation of cowardly terrorist acts that are contrary to all humanitarian principles and values, confirming the Kingdom’s stand with the UAE in its relief efforts....

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 01:58 PM PDT
It looks like open season has been declared on the battle flag of Army of Northern Virginia, which is commonly referred to as the Confederate battle flag. But, if you are looking for a flag to ban as racist, you might as well start with the American flag. After all, the American flag is associated with the United States government that sanctioned slavery from the enactment of the US Constitution in 1789 to the addition of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in December of 1865 — months after...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 01:54 PM PDT
By Riad Kahwaji* The Iraqi government’s over-reliance on Shiite militias to do the job of the Iraqi military has raised eye-brows over Baghdad’s true intentions in the current war on terrorism and whether it has a hidden agenda with its strategic ally, Iran, to weaken and cleanse Sunni provinces and thereby reach oil-rich areas in the north. The ease with which the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) advance into predominantly Sunni towns and cities with little if any...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 01:51 PM PDT
A spokesman for the Iraqi defense minister speaking with the Associated Press on Thursday said an Iraqi pilot who has been training for four years in the United States was flying an F-16 Fighting Falcon that crashed in southern Arizona, AP reported. Brig. Gen. Tahseen Ibrahim told The Associated Press, “We have no word yet on his fate or the reason behind the crash,” adding that Iraqi defense officials were awaiting further details from the American government. No information has been...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:44 AM PDT
By Rupak Bhattacharjee* Connectivity is one area of cooperation in which India and Bangladesh have made real progress during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Dhaka. Clearly displaying mutual trust and confidence, the two neighbouring nations decided to connect each other through road, rail and sea. Both the sides agreed to open new road linkages and revive the British-era transport networks, especially railways and waterways. New Delhi and Dhaka had been engaged in hectic...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:41 AM PDT
By Rajeshwari Krishnamurthy* On 22 June 2015, the Afghan Taliban claimed a suicide bombing attack by seven militants on the Afghan parliament that killed two and injured several. The attack, dramatic even for Afghanistan standards, took place as the Wolesi Jirga was about to finalise Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s nominee Mohammed Stanekzai as the Afghan Defence Minister – an office that had remained vacant for nine months. The Afghan Taliban have become stronger over the past year, and more...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:38 AM PDT
It was clear even before the Riga summit held on May 21-22 that the discussion would not be easy. The stumbling block, as should have been expected, was a problem that has been included in the agenda at the request of Europe’s major powers, though it was not directly related to the main idea of the project – the European integration of six post-Soviet states, namely Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Contrary to the initially declared objectives of the...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:33 AM PDT
By US President Barack Obama THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Have a seat. Five years ago, after nearly a century of talk, decades of trying, a year of bipartisan debate — we finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for all. Over those five years, as we’ve worked to implement the Affordable Care Act, there have been successes and setbacks. The setbacks I remember clearly. (Laughter.) But as the dust has settled, there can be no doubt...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:28 AM PDT
By David Kaye This is a letter from the UN Whistleblower Coalition to the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye, who will be presenting a report on protection of sources and whistleblowers to the UN General Assembly in October. Over the past decade the United Nations and its specialized agencies have established new whistleblower policies. Unfortunately, implementation is weak in many of the UN agencies and the policies themselves may lag behind best practice...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:21 AM PDT
The monthly total of contributory pensions paid out by the Spanish Social Security system amounted to 8.24 billion euros at 1 June 2015. Year-on-year growth in this figure now stands at 2.9%. ​The average retirement pension stood at 1,020.80 euros, 2.1% higher than in the same period last year. The average pension from the Spanish Social Security system as a whole, which includes all the various types of pension available (retirement, permanent disability, widowhood, orphanhood, and those paid...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:20 AM PDT
By Peter A. Petri and Michael G. Plummer* The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, negotiations are in their final phase and the policy debate is in full swing. Unfortunately, it’s shaping up as a debate about trees, not forests; it ignores the central goal of the TPP: to renew the Asia-Pacific trading system and firm up America’s role in it. World trade rules have not changed since 1994 — not since the rise of the internet, China and ubiquitous global production chains — and so trade...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:16 AM PDT
Defense Secretary Ash Carter met yesterday with Ukraine Defense Minister Colonel-General Stepan Poltorak at the NATO Defense Ministerial in Brussels, according to a Defense Department news release issued today. This was two leaders’ first meeting, the release said. The defense leaders discussed Russia’s ongoing aggression in eastern Ukraine, the release said, and Carter commended the general for Ukraine’s efforts toward implementing the Minsk agreements despite Russia’s...

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Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:14 AM PDT
It has been an enduring question: how to monetise ideas and intellectual property, and ring them in an effort to stave off the imitators and pilferers. In this view, ideas are not to be shared so much as loaned on interest, or transferred by fee. The central result of this will always be the same: censorship, restriction, and limits. These moves are always framed as protective ones, whether to the consumer, or the creator of that copyrighted material. Australia is a country very much interested...

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