Old City Warsaw - 8 December 2014

They put this tree up in record time

Still traveling and I don’t have much time. I’m going to Estonia tomorrow. I’ll see if there is anything interesting happening. I know this is happening:

The serial deadly errors of US foreign policy

No Oil - No Israel - No War

" Nobody in Washington is going to help you." - Dirty Stinking US Cops - The disgusting outrage continues

NYPD Publicly Executes Eric Garner for trying to make a living breaking up packs of cigarettes selling them one at a time to poor people - Don't believe your lying eyes, the cop, as usual, is found not guilty: 

Saying Israel has been ‘singled out’ ( for nuclear weapons) is like saying Federal prosecutors ‘singled out’ fraudster Bernie Madoff for prosecution over his investment pyramid scam

UN General Assembly Demands Israel Mothball its Nuclear Arsenal

By Juan Cole | Dec. 4, 2014 |

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By Juan Cole | —

The United Nations General Assembly (where all 193 countries in the world get a vote) has almost unanimously demanded that Israel give up its nuclear weapons and cooperate with making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone. The only dissenters were Israel and the United States, along with three small South Pacific islands that always vote with the US, presumably in order to receive foreign aid. Some 161 countries voted for the measure.

The US complained that the resolution singled out one country for opprobrium but this allegation is frankly dishonest.

First of all, you can’t complain about singling out a country that is alone in flouting UNGA directives on nuclear non-proliferation in the Middle East. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a stockpile of nuclear warheads (several hundred). No other country in the region has so much as a proven military nuclear program. (Iran, often accused of wanting a nuclear bomb, has never been found by inspectors to have miiitarized its civilian enrichment program, and former Israel defense minister Ehud Barak admitted it publicly). Egypt brought the resolution because it is made insecure by Israel’s bombs. Current Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once suggested blowing up the Aswan Dam and washing all Egyptians into the Mediterranean. With crazy people like that in the Israeli government, Egypt is right to be concerned about them having their finger on the nuclear trigger.

Saying Israel has been ‘singled out’ here is like saying Federal prosecutors ‘singled out’ fraudster Bernie Madoff for prosecution over his investment pyramid scam. Rather, they just prosecuted the one major financier known to have committed billions of dollars in fraud. It wasn’t like there were a lot of Bernie Madoffs, though there certainly were a lot of other kinds of shenanigans on Wall Street.

Moreover, it was a busy UNGA session, and if anyone bothered actually to look at their votes that day, you would find the UNGA also reprimanded Syria for having chemical weapons (though most of these have been destroyed via Russian mediation) and also asked Pakistan and India to give up their nukes.

So actually Israel wasn’t singled out at all, but is just in the same category in this regard (having weapons of mass destruction) as Syria, Pakistan and India.

Israel’s nuclear arsenal was acquired with British, French and American connivance, and some of the components for it were illegally smuggled out of the US by Zionist secret agents. 

Tel Aviv’s stockpile of nuclear bombs has been a deeply destabilizing factor in the Middle East. Its existence certainly impelled Iraq to try to develop its own nuclear bomb (though it never got very far). Since Iraq’s attempt in this regard was made the basis for the Bush administration to launch its 2003 war on Iraq and to occupy the country, it is not too much to conclude that Israel’s nuclear weapons are indirectly what mired the US in a fruitless 8-year war in the Middle East.

Iran is suffering from very severe international and American economic sanctions, which amount to a financial blockade (a kind of declaration of war) on the country, devastating its middle class. The reason for this attempt to de-industrialize Iran and make its people povery-stricken is the unproven allegation that Iran is violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its additional protocol.

But Iran’s supreme theocrat has given numerous oral fatwas against making, stockpiling or deploying nuclear weapons, and UN inspectors have been allowed into Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities and never found any evidence of attempted weaponization.

So Israelis are allowed to get rich and given sweetheart trade deals with the US (they even still get direct civilian aid, which is to say they are Welfare Queens on a massive scale), even though they have actually done what Iran is only vaguely suspected of maybe one day wanting to do. They don’t suffer sanctions the way the Iranians do, over the imaginary Iranian nukes, while they have real ones!

The unfair policies of the US in this regard has driven the arms race in the Middle East. Israel is a serial violator of its neighbors’ sovereignty and keeps launching wars on them, confident in the advantage its nuclear stockpile gives it. I am against nuclear proliferation, but anyone could understand why Iraq felt like it needed a nuclear counter weight to Israel. Those Iranian hawks who want a nuclear bomb want it in some important part because they know of Israel’s stockpile.

There will never be any real stability in the Middle East until Israel complies with the UNGA resolution. Apologists who point out that the Middle East has lots of problems not caused by Israel are being dishonest. The point is that Israeli policies themselves do cause a lot of problems.

——

Related video added by Juan Cole

The BBC Film That Exposed Israel’s Secret Illegal Nuclear Weapons (FULL Documentary) 

Capital flight and the pressure of Western sanctions on Russia is biting

The Guardian view on Russia: rouble trouble

Editorial

As Vladimir Putin pursues a high-stakes expansionist foreign policy, problems are piling up on the home front. The rouble appears to be in freefall. Never since the financial crash of 1998 has the national currency seemed so weak. Russia’s central bank has already spent over $100bn this year trying to prop it up. Fears of inflation, and of bank runs by Russian citizens worried about their savings, are once again haunting the country, a chilling reminder of the financial instability of the 1990s. Moscow is now expecting the economy to enter recession next year, a sharp contrast with its earlier forecast of 1.2% growth in GDP. Capital flight is reaching new heights.

The main sources of this grim reality are to be found in the 40% drop in global oil prices since the summer, as well as in western sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

But the bleak economic picture is also the result of one of the hugely wasted opportunities of the Putin era: there has been no genuine economic modernisation of Russia, a country that remains overwhelmingly dependent on oil and gas exports, just as it was in Soviet times. For all of Mr Putin’s nationalistic posturing, this is a political leadership that has failed to bring Russia into a 21st-century economy centred on innovation, knowledge and new technologies. The heavy industry inherited from Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR has been the foundation of the Russian petro-state. More than two-thirds of Russia’s exports are from the energy sector.

Mr Putin’s domestic strategy throughout the last decade has been to present Russians with a deal: improved living standards in return for the curbing of political freedoms and concentration of political power. This quid pro quo was made possible by higher oil prices, which rose from $30 a barrel in 2003 to a peak of $147 a barrel in 2008.

Soon Moscow will surely try to mitigate the potential consequences of the rouble’s decline, including unease at home. It will hope that a weakened currency will reduce the pressure on the budget, by boosting the rouble value of Russia’s oil reserves. But that won’t stop Russian banks struggling to deal with debt. And a continued fall in the exchange rate will encourage Russians to convert roubles to dollars, thus increasing the risk of bank runs.

Mr Putin has now said that Gazprom will scrap the South Stream gas pipeline project to Europe, a sign of the trouble Russia is in. Whether these hard times will mellow his external ambitions or fuel further revanchist adventurism is now a key question. The Russian president should come back to sober realities and choose moderation. The economic numbers leave him little alternative.

Iran bombs Islamic State targets in Iraq, says Pentagon

2 December 2014 Last updated at 21:29 ET BBC

There had been reports of Iranian air strikes in Diyala province, where Iraqi forces have been battling IS

Continue reading the main story

Iran has conducted air strikes against Islamic State (IS) targets in eastern Iraq during recent days, a Pentagon spokesman says.

Rear Adm John Kirby said the US, which has conducted its own air strikes in Iraq, was not co-ordinating with Iran.

A senior Iranian military official also dismissed talk of co-operation between the two countries.

A US-led coalition has launched hundreds of air strikes against IS since August.

The US has said it would be inappropriate for Iran to join that coalition, even though the two long-time adversaries face a common enemy in IS.

Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the US and Iran have had a fraught relationship.

Washington severed ties the following year after Iranian students occupied the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage.

‘Nothing changed'

Rear Adm Kirby’s comments followed reports that American-made F4 Phantom jets from the Iranian air force had been targeting IS positions in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala.

“We have indications that they did indeed fly air strikes with F-4 Phantoms in the past several days," he said.

It was up to Iraq to oversee and co-ordinate flights by different countries in its airspace, he added.

"We are flying missions over Iraq, we co-ordinate with the Iraqi government as we conduct those," he said. “ t's up to the Iraqi government to deconflict that airspace."

“Nothing has changed about our policy of not co-ordinating military activity with the Iranians."

The Deputy Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces Brig-Gen Massoud Jazayeri also denied collaboration.

He said Iran considered the US responsible for Iraq’s "unrest and problems", adding that the US would "definitely not have a place in the future of that country".

Shia-ruled Iran has close ties to Iraq’s Shia-led government, which has struggled to counter IS militants as they seized swathes of territory in eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq.

Military analysts said earlier this year that Iran was supplying Iraq with Sukhoi Su-25 attack jets to help in the fight against IS. 

Shia militias trained and funded by Iran have also been sent to Iraq to support Kurdish fighters battling IS militants.

EARLIER IRANIAN MILITARY ASSISTANCE AGAINST ISIS

Forget the Big Macs

Mediterranean diet could slow aging, study suggests

• LINKEDIN

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By Deborah KotzGLOBE STAFF  DECEMBER 03, 2014

As evidence continues to build that the Mediterranean diet is among the healthiest on the planet, Boston researchers reported Tuesday that a diet rich in olive oil, fish, and plant foods, as well as a glass of wine with meals, could lead to a moderately longer lifespan.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, examined nutritional data from 4,676 women participating in the well-known Harvard Nurses’ Health Study and determined that those whose dietary habits hewed closest to the Mediterranean diet had longer telomeres, which protect the ends of cell’s chromosomes and shorten with age.

“We know that having shorter telomeres is associated with a lower life expectancy and a greater risk of cancer, heart disease, and other diseases,” said study co-author Immaculata De Vivo, an associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Certain lifestyle factors like obesity, sugary sodas, and smoking have been found to accelerate telomere shortening, and now our research suggests the Mediterranean diet can slow this shortening.”

Mediterranean diet components such as vegetables, fish, and wine are rich in antioxidants and have anti-inflammatory effects that could protect against cell aging, but the researchers didn’t find that any single food offered more benefits than another. Rather, it was the combination of dietary components -- rated on a scale of 0 to 9, with a higher score more closely resembling the Mediterranean plan -- that predicted telomere length.

Each one point change in diet score corresponded to a greater telomere length and appeared to add 1.5 years of life, De Vivo said. The researchers controlled for other lifestyle factors that may have affected the results, such as exercise, smoking, and age.

New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle, who was not involved in the study, said the findings should be interpreted with caution because the methods used by the researchers to connect a woman’s dietary intake with telomere lengths do not prove that diet alters telomeres.

“With that said, the study says eating healthfully is good for you,” Nestle added. “It might even make you live a year or so longer.”

A 2013 clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Spanish participants at increased risk for heart disease who were randomly selected to follow a Mediterranean diet had 30 percent fewer heart disease deaths, strokes, and heart attacks than those randomly assigned to a group that received generic nutrition advice to reduce sweets and eat fewer processed foods.

Another small clinical trial published last year involving 35 men in their 50s and 60s found that those who adopted for five years several lifestyle changes -- including following a vegan diet, taking fish oil supplements, and engaging in regular exercise and meditation -- experienced a 10 percent lengthening of their cell’s telomeres.

“The Mediterranean diet is two-thirds of the way toward a whole foods plant-based diet, but it begs the question as to whether it’s the optimal diet,” said Dr. Dean Ornish, president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, who led the telomere clinical trial involving middle-aged men. “We’ve found that when people make bigger changes, as an intervention, they could actually lengthen their telomeres” rather than just slow their shortening.

In the latest study, the Brigham researchers found that women who followed other healthful diet approaches -- eating chicken and low-fat dairy foods in addition to fruits, vegetables, and legumes -- also had longer telomeres than those who ate a typical American diet filled with hamburgers, bacon, sweets, and fried foods. The Mediterranean diet followers, however, had the longest telomeres on average.

Genetic differences in telomere length that vary by ethnicity might explain some of the difference, wrote Peter Nilsson, a professor of medicine at Lund University in Sweden, in an editorial that accompanied the study. It could be those born with longer telomeres are also more likely to gravitate toward a Mediterranean style diet because of cultural preferences.

Deborah Kotz can be reached at dkotz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @debkotz2.

Russia, where investment money goes to die

Russia intervenes as crumbling rouble echoes 1998 debt crisis 

Collapse in Russian currency, which has been badly buffeted by a plunge of almost 40% in oil prices, prompts central bank action 

Larry Elliott, economics editor GUARDIAN

Monday 1 December 2014 14.17 EST 

Russia’s central bank was forced to step in to defend the rouble on the foreign exchanges on Monday after fears over the economy’s vulnerability to a weak oil price sent the currency to a record low against the dollar. 

 Moscow was forced to abandon its hands-off policy towards the rouble amid heavy selling, unmatched since the Russian debt default of 1998. The Russian central bank intervened when the rouble was down 6.5% on the day against the US dollar, and by the close of trading the currency had recouped more than half its earlier losses. 

 A bounce in the oil price from a fresh five-year low and a sense that the sell-off since last week’s meeting of the Opec cartel has been overdone helped sentiment towards the Russian currency, which has been badly buffeted by a plunge of almost 40% in the cost of crude since the summer. 

 Data from the US suggesting that drilling activity in the shale oil sector is being affected by lower oil prices also helped the rouble by pushing down the value of the dollar. Oil is denominated in dollars, so when the US currency falls oil becomes cheaper and more attractive for holders of other currencies. 

 With Moscow fearful that the drop in the value of the rouble makes Russia vulnerable to capital flight, Ksenia Yudaeva, the Russian central bank’s deputy chairwoman, told newswires that households should not panic. She said the rise in interest rates to 9.5% should encourage them not to convert savings into euros or dollars. “It’s necessary to explain to people that the yield they get on their deposits at the moment will guarantee a high degree of safety for their savings with regards to inflation. They should think twice before rushing out, losing the yield on their deposits, taking on currency risks and losing money on their currency conversions.” 

 But Lee Hardman, currency strategist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, said falling oil prices were “reinforcing the loss of investor confidence in the rouble” at a time when it was affected by western sanctions imposed over Ukraine. At one stage on Monday, Brent crude was trading at $67.50 a barrel, a fresh five year low, before recovering to $71.90. 

 “There’s a sense that the market got a little bit ahead of itself, and we’re seeing some producer buying come in and it’s driving the market back up,” said Phil Flynn, analyst at the Price Futures Group in Chicago. Oil is still down about 10% since producer group Opec’s decision last Thursday not to cut output despite fears of a supply glut. 

 Saudi Arabia, the most influential member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, blocked moves by some smaller producers to curb output. The Saudis argued that low prices would ultimately hurt US shale oil production, which analysts say is responsible for much of the oversupply now. 

 Capital Economics said a degree of calm had returned to markets after weekend talk of a commodity-led meltdown. It said the apparent freefall in crude prices had been exaggerated by thin trading due to the US holiday, adding that the impact of lower energy costs would be positive for global growth.