Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday 26 July 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 25 Jul 2015 03:10 PM PDT


Footage of an impressive giant squid filmed by Russian sailors has emerged online, with the animal attempting to steal the fishermen’s catch.
In the video, the squid is trying to eat a large fish, while the sailors prod the animal with a pole to drive it off.
The squid is about five times as big as the huge fish it tries to snatch. The massive creature makes a valiant attempt, but is eventually pushed away by the sailors.
It remains unclear which species of squid this one is. There are two: the giant squid which is long, and the colossal squid which is broader and even larger than its cousin.
Not much is known about the species because only a few specimens have ever been caught or captured on video.
Giant and colossal squids are about 12 meters in length.
“Its eyes are supposedly the largest in the animal kingdom, as big as a basketball perhaps. I mean bigger than my head, which is amazing to think about. And that’s so they can see in the dark,” Leslie Schwerin, who produced a documentary about giant squids, told the Discovery Channel.
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Posted: 25 Jul 2015 01:52 PM PDT

The National Health Service (NHS) in England has unveiled new plans to ensure patients requiring urgent care are seen within four hours.
The drive is aimed remedying the NHS failure to meet its target for dealing with 95% of Accidents and Emergency (A&E) patients within four hours last winter.
NHS plans to ensure the time frame by creating better links between Primary Care Trusts and Hospitals.
The NHS in England has designated eight vanguard areas in the hope of improving the services. These include speeding up the process of developing GP (General Practitioner) services in hospitals and creating mobile treatment centres.
The changes come in the hope of forging a closer liaison between primary care trusts and hospitals.
The NHS England director of acute care, Keith Willett, said: “This proves a modern NHS needs a very different approach and shows, even in times of austerity, we can transform patient care. We cannot delay in now securing that same advantage for the thousands of other patients – such as those suffering a heart attack, stroke, or aneurysm, as well as helping critically-ill children.”
Some critics say the NHS needs an urgent injection of money to help it run more efficiently.
However some others argue the money alone will not solve the problem and there needs to be a fundamental change in the management of the crisis-hit organization.
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Posted: 25 Jul 2015 04:47 AM PDT

Blair France moved into the Calgary Housing Company complex with her husband and two children, but several months later  their children became victim to anti-White racial abuse and physical violence, by the children of African tenants.
Mrs France thought she would solve this problem by hosting an anti-bullying barbeque for all the tenants, but things just got worse.
A few days after the barbeque, a public housing supervisor said things were getting out of hand, and the African kids were targeting another White family.
When she complained to the Calgary Housing Company, they sent a letter to the families of the bullies, warning them that they would be evicted if they don’t follow the rules.
Mrs France said after that, the bullying intensified, and the bullies threatened to kill her children.
“They are so scared, they don’t want to go to school or even outside,” she wrote. “We just need to move.”
Fortunately, they were relocated the next day.
Despite writing to the mayor of Calgary and the public-housing officials, as well as the story being picked up by the media, no one actually did anything to stop the bullying, except threatening the bullies with eviction, which clearly had failed.
        
Posted: 25 Jul 2015 03:07 AM PDT
US President Barack Obama participates in an interview with Jon Sopel of the BBC at the White House.
US president Barack Obama has once again threatened Iran with a military attack despite the recent conclusion of nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries.
In an interview with the BBC broadcast on Thursday, Obama said the military option is still on the table even after the landmark diplomatic achievement earlier this month over Tehran’s nuclear program.
“We are settling the Iran deal, but we still have a big account that we’re going to have to work. Hopefully some of it diplomatically, if necessary some of it militarily,” the US president said.
Obama acknowledged that Iran was funding its strategic priorities even during the sanctions and economic hardship.
“Iran has shown itself to be willing, even in the midst of real hardship, to fund what they consider to be strategic priorities,” he noted.
Obama said US Persian Gulf allies that have worries about the situation in the Middle East should strengthen their militaries and address social and political issues that are leading to the threat of the ISIL terror group.
Regarding the release of Iran’s frozen assets, he said this was part of the nuclear deal.
Obama’s remarks come after Iran and the P5+1 group of countries reached a conclusion on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on July 14 in the Austrian capital of Vienna following days of intensive talks over Tehran’s nuclear program.
Senior Republican lawmakers have vowed to do their best effort to scuttle the Iran nuclear pact.
Republicans control majorities in both chambers of Congress. Many have strongly opposed the agreement, which they say will threaten US ally Israel and empower Iran.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz offered a vigorous defense of the Iran agreement as they faced tough questioning at a Senate committee hearing on Thursday.
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Posted: 25 Jul 2015 02:58 AM PDT

The scale of the Defense Department’s mishandling of the deadly anthrax virus, which has seen live spores shipped to dozens of labs across eight countries, highlighted a “major problem” with the protocols for dealing with such dangerous materials, the Pentagon said.
A month-long DoD probe into the root cause behind Utah’s army lab blundering shipments of live anthrax has revealed major lapses in protocols on dealing with the deadly decease which resulted in the shipment of live samples across 20 states and to seven foreign countries.
One of the main problems was a “systemic … lack of specific standards” in the preparation and transport of anthrax samples, the probe found.
“By any measure, this was a massive institutional failure with a potentially deadly biotoxin,” deputy secretary of defense Bob Work said in a press conference on Thursday.
However, the probe failed to identify a single “root” cause of the “failure.”
The investigation instead placed the blame on the lack of effective protocols in the broader scientific community for inactivating anthrax spores, which pushed individual DoD labs to create and follow their own protocols.
“The development and implementation of ineffective irradiation and viability testing procedures took place over the last decade; this represents an institutional problem at [Dugway Proving Grounds] and does not necessarily reflect on any one individual,” the report states.
The probe found that established protocols, not standardized across all labs, allowed live anthrax spores to contaminate the dead samples.
The 38-page report, released Thursday, also found out that testing for live spores may have not raised any alarms because the sample sizes were too small or incubation periods too short between irradiation and testing.
Four Defense Department labs irradiate and ship anthrax. These labs can calibrate their equipment to detect live spores and support research and development against a potential biological attack with anthrax. However prior to shipment, the Defense Department labs must destroy the disease with gamma radiation and culture inactivated bacteria to make sure no spores survived.
However, in May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that irradiated anthrax samples contained some live spores. According to Work, 17 out of 33 samples send from Dugway Proving Grounds lab in Utah tested positive for live anthrax.
“Obviously, when over half of those anthrax batches that were presumed to be inactivated instead prove to contain live spores, we have a major problem,” Work said.
“The low numbers of live spores found in inactivated DoD samples did not pose a risk to the general public,” the report read. “Nonetheless, the shipment of live samples outside of the select agent program restrictions is a serious breach of regulations.”
Work announced that the Army will now conduct an internal investigation, at the same time warning that the number of labs which received live anthrax might increase as the CDC is now looking into secondary labs that could have received a sample from other labs.
DoD is now working to develop standards for the handling and inactivation of anthrax pathogens and until that process is completed, Work said, a complete moratorium on the production and transport of anthrax has been imposed.
Speaking at the press conference, the US undersecretary of defense Frank Kendall furthermore noted that he “can’t absolutely guarantee ” that DoD will track down all live anthrax samples sent from Dugway.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 22:01