Tag: europe

‘Is Washington still our ally?’: EU accuses US of PROFITEERING from Ukraine war through sales of guns and gas and threatens trade war – as top diplomats moan Biden’s green subsidies mean European businesses are relocating to US

The EU has accused the US of profiteering from the Ukraine war by selling guns and gas at ramped up prices.

Several high-ranking officials within the Bloc accused Joe Biden of capitalizing on the brutal Russian invasion by marking up the cost to import the vital products.

One senior official told Politico they believe America was standing to gain the most from the continuation of the fighting, nine months after soldiers first invaded.

‘The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,’ the official said.

In recent months, Europeans have weaned off Russian energy and gas with the countries forced to look to the US for their oil.

EU countries however pay roughly four-times as much for gas as it costs in America, with cheaper energy becoming hugely competitive in the states.

Businesses are looking to pump cash into the US fuel market with new investments – as some even relocate their firms to the other side of the Atlantic.

It has sent some world leaders in Europe into a frenzy, with French President Emmanuel Macron recently saying it was not friendly of the US to treat allies as it is.

Meanwhile European countries are suffering an arms shortage due to huge shipments that have been sent to Ukraine – with them racing to replenish supplies over the winter.

Yet the Americans continue to send more, with the cost of supplying Ukraine to the US now at over $19billion as another $400million was added earlier this week.

It comes at an already tumultuous moment between the Americans and several nations as Europe grapples with the fallout from Biden’s green subsidies.

‘The Inflation Reduction Act has changed everything,’ one EU official said. ‘Is Washington still our ally or not?’

Tensions came to a boil on Friday as EU trade ministers met and branded the act ‘discriminatory’, ahead of it coming into force in just over a month.

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Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater

Archaeologists are trying to piece together the mystery of an underwater trail of ancient rock piles, or cairns, that stretch for miles under the shimmering waters of Lake Constance, a glacial lake that lies between Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and which appear to have been made by humans who lived some 5,500 years ago, according to a 2021 study.

The huge cairns have attracted public attention and expert debate ever since they were first discovered in 2015 by the Institute for Lake Research in Langenargen. Roughly 170 of these rock formations are arranged in a line under the shallow waters of Lake Constance, several hundred feet from its southwest Swiss shore. 

A team led by Urs Leuzinger, an archaeologist at the Museum of Archaeology of the Canton of Thurgau, have amassed compelling evidence that the rock formations were made by humans who lived in the area during the Neolithic period. 

The piles are several dozen feet wide, with heights of up to six feet, distinguishing them as impressive structures that would have required a lot of effort and time to build, though “the function of this 10-kilometer long prehistoric feature remains enigmatic,” according to a 2021 study published in the Annual Review of Swiss Archaeology. The findings of this study will be presented in a pop-up exhibit this week called “Bodensee Stonehenge” (meaning Lake Constance Stonehenge) at the Office for Archaeology Thurgau.

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The digital euro may have spending limits

Fabio Panetta, an Executive Board Member of the European Central Bank (ECB), has proposed that users of the digital euro should only be allowed to spend €50 per transaction and have a maximum monthly spending limit of just €1,000 if they want to avoid having their transaction data recorded by the ECB.

The digital euro is the European Union’s (EU’s) proposed central bank digital currency (CBDC) and officials involved with the project have already confirmed that it will have less anonymity than cash.

But during an appearance at a “Towards a legislative framework for a digital euro” event (which was jointly organized by the European Commission (EC), the executive branch of the EU, and the ECB), Panetta and other officials discussed further restrictions that they hope to impose when the digital euro rolls out.

Panetta proposed that the ECB should be able to see data on payments between digital euro users but that it wouldn’t hold personal data about those users. He indicated that the only way for digital euro users to possibly avoid having their payment data recorded would be to stick to “very small value payments.”

“If we allow users to do transactions up to say €50 with a maximum…volume of transactions in a given timeframe that is monthly not more than €1,000…transaction not more than 50, then one might discuss that this could not be recorded but this is a discussion which would take place,” Panetta said.

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Sabotage Again Suspected As More European Internet Cables Cut

Two European fibre optic cables have been severed in the last week, fuelling speculation of possible sabotage with both phone networks and internet traffic disrupted.

The first incident took place in the North Sea last week and saw an underwater fibre optic cable cut, shutting off the internet and mobile phone networking to the Shetland Islands, the northernmost islands of the United Kingdom for an entire night.

The incident affected the SHEFA2 submarine fibre optic cable, which was deployed in 2007 and connects the Shetlands, the Orkney Islands as well as the Faroe Islands, to mainland Scotland. Another cable connecting the Shetlands and the Faroe Islands had also been damaged the week prior, an incident which was blamed on a fishing ship.

According to a report from French broadcaster BFMTV, a second fibre optic cable severing incident was reported by the security firm Zscaler, which claimed that damage had been detected at a fibre optic hub in Aix-en-Provence, near Marseille last week.

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Here’s Where US Nuclear Bombs Are Stored In Europe

Back in January, in what was a rare showing of consensus on a global security topic, the United States, Russia, China, the UK and France jointly agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. The pledge, the result of months of talks, was summarized by a senior U.S. state department official at the time as: “an acknowledgement that it is something that we want to avoid”.

Now, though, with increasingly threatening rhetoric from Russia, U.S. President Biden has said that Putin is “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons“, warning: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon”. Adding historical context, Biden said: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Currently, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, there is estimated to be almost 13,000 nuclear warheads in the hands of nine countries.

At the top of the list, as compiled by the Federation Of American Scientists (FAS), are of course Russia and the U.S. with a combined arsenal of over 11,000. The FAS warned in late 2021 that “instead of planning for nuclear disarmament, the nuclear-armed states appear to plan to retain large arsenals for the indefinite future. All continue to modernize their remaining nuclear forces…and all appear committed to retaining nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.”

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14 Things We Know About The Mysterious “Explosions” That Severely Damaged The Nord Stream 1 And Nord Stream 2 Pipelines

Something really strange just happened.  On Monday, large underwater “explosions” were detected in the precise areas of the sea where the Nord Stream pipeline system is now leaking.  In fact, the explosions were so large that they actually registered on the Richter scale.  If someone wanted to purposely damage the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, very large explosions would be needed because those pipelines are extremely thick.  So it appears that this was a deliberate act of sabotage, and that is what many European officials are now alleging.  But if that is the case, who was behind it?

At this point we just don’t know.

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From Today, All New Vehicles In The EU Will Have Surveillance Black Boxes

From today, all new vehicles sold in the EU will have mandatory black boxes fitted that record technical data and will be accessible by authorities, greasing the skids for surveillance-powered speed-limiting technology.

While for the time being, drivers can opt-out of using the feature, privacy advocates fear the technology will become mandatory once it is properly rolled out.

Back in 2019, the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) announced that July 6 would mark the day when all car manufacturers would be forced to fit new models with a system that keeps track of technical data.

The data recorded will include “the vehicle’s speed, braking, steering wheel angle, its incline on the road, and whether the vehicle’s various safety systems were in operation, starting with seatbelts.”

Although insurance companies won’t have immediate access to the data, it will be available to law enforcement.

Authorities claim the data will be “anonymized,” meaning the information can’t be used to identify the owner of the vehicle, although only the incredibly naive would plausibly believe that.

Such systems are expected to eventually include speed-limiting technology.

As Reclaim the Net’s Didi Rankovic explains, the most common method of speed limiting technology is Intelligent Speed Assistant (ISA).

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3 million+ innocent private chats could be handed over to investigators under new EU plans

A leaked document from the European Commission (EC), the executive branch of the European Union (EU), has revealed that the artificial intelligence (AI) it plans to use to mass surveil private chats for “grooming” content is expected to falsely flag content and forward it to EU investigators 10% of the time.

This proposed mass surveillance of online chats has been dubbed “Chat Control” and is being pushed by the EC as a way to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM). However, in a leaked document that was obtained and published by Netzpolitik, the EC admitted that its proposed surveillance measures would result in a large amount of false flags.

“The accuracy of grooming detection technology is around 90%,” the EC admitted in the document. “This means that 9 out of 10 contents recognized by the system are grooming.”

The leaked document contains the EC’s answers to a series of questions from the German government about the implementation of Chat Control.

Under the current Chat Control plans, private chats, messages, and emails will be automatically scanned by AI for suspicious content. If the AI detects suspicious content, it will be flagged and sent to investigators at a planned EU center. These investigators will view the content, identify false positives, and forward illegal content to EU law enforcement agency Europol and other relevant law enforcement authorities.

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Rationing Has Already Started In Europe As The Entire Globe Plunges Into A Horrific Economic Nightmare

Up until the past couple of years, many of us in the western world always considered shortages to be something that only “unsophisticated” poor countries on the other side of the planet had to deal with.  But the last couple of years have shown us that painful shortages can happen to wealthy countries in the western world too.  At first we were told that they were “just temporary”, but the months went by and we just kept having more shortages.  In fact, in 2022 “supply problems” have become so serious that many supermarkets in Europe have been forced to strictly ration essential items at various times.  For example, it was being reported that due to the war in Ukraine flour, sunflower oil and sugar were all being rationed by stores in Greece…

After limiting the sale of some flours and sunflower oil online, Greek supermarkets are turning to rationing the sale of sugar as well, now including in their stores, over supply problems.

The AB Vassilopoulos is setting a maximum limit on the purchase of all brands of corn and sunflower oil and of flour per customer while Mymarket put a ceiling on sunflower oil purchases and Sklavenitis has added sugar to the rationed sales of corn oil through its online store, with a maximum of four packs, the products in high demand from restaurants, some of which said they have to stop selling french fries and other fried foods.

Over the past few months we have seen similar measures implemented in other major European nations as well.  For example, the war in Ukraine prompted some pretty severe rationing in Spain…

Sporadic shortages of products like eggs, milk, and other dairy products also hit Spain since the war in Ukraine began. And major supermarkets including Mercadona and Makro began rationing sunflower oil earlier this month.

Now, stores will temporarily be allowed to limit “the number of goods that can be bought by a client,” according to information in the Official State Gazette published on Wednesday.

Looking forward, natural gas rationing is the next big thing that many people in Europe are talking about.  The flow of Russian natural gas into Europe has been cut back, and it appears that this may soon cause widespread rationing in Italy…

Italy may start rationing natural-gas consumption to certain industrial giants, after Russia’s Gazprom halved supplies on Friday.

On the weekend, the newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that the Italian government and energy industry would meet Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss the crisis, with the likely outcome being the introduction of a state of alert under the country’s gas emergency protocol.

And CNN is reporting that Germany is “one step closer to rationing supplies” now that Russia has decided to reduce the flow of natural gas going to that country…

Europe’s biggest economy is now officially running short of natural gas and is escalating a crisis plan to preserve supplies as Russia turns off the taps.

Germany on Thursday activated the second phase of its three-stage gas emergency program, taking it one step closer to rationing supplies to industry — a step that would deliver a huge blow to the manufacturing heart of its economy.

Of course there are other parts of the globe that are dealing with problems that are far, far more serious than what Europe is facing right now.

As I discussed in an article that I posted earlier this week, significant numbers of people are starting to literally drop dead from starvation in portions of eastern Africa.  Global food supplies just keep getting tighter, and the head of the UN is openly telling us that the world is heading into an “unprecedented global hunger crisis”.

So if you have plenty of food to eat tonight, you should be thankful.

Here in the United States, economic conditions are deteriorating fairly rapidly, and most Americans are completely and totally unprepared for any sort of a major economic downturn.  Earlier today, I came across yet another survey that shows that about 60 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck…

“We find that consumers in all income brackets — including those who make more than $100,000 annually — are living paycheck to paycheck. PYMNTS’ research finds that 61% of U.S. consumers were living paycheck to paycheck in April 2022, marking a 9 percentage point increase from 52% in April 2021, meaning that approximately three in five U.S. consumers devote nearly all of their salaries to expenses with little to nothing left over at the end of the month.”

So what is going to happen when those people start losing their jobs in large numbers?

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