EU security must no longer depend on US – Macron

EU security must no longer depend on US – Macron (Source RT) The security of the European Union must no longer depend on the US, French President Emmanuel Macron said. He also called for a review of the security approach towards Europe’s partners, including Russia. Europe can “no longer” entrust its security to the US alone, the French president said, speaking at the annual French ambassadors’ conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris. “It is up to us today to take responsibility and guarantee [the EU’s] security and, therefore, EU sovereignty,” he added. Speaking about Brexit, he stressed that France wants to maintain “strong relationship” with London but “not at the price of the dissolution” of the EU. It is necessary to build “a strategic partnership” with the UK, he said, adding that he has “the same thought” about EU neighbors Russia and Turkey. The French leader stated that he wants “to launch an exhaustive review of EU security with all Europe’s partners, which includes Russia.”

 

Russia says it will hold Wr games in the Mediterranean this week

Russia says it will hold Wr games in the Mediterranean this week (Source cbsnews.com) NATO says the Russian navy is building up its presence in the Mediterranean Sea amid growing tensions over the war in Syria. Russia has provided crucial military support for Syrian government forces, which are expected to mount an offensive in the northern Idlib province, the last major rebel stronghold in the country. At least eight ships, including a missile cruiser and two missile-carrying submarines, have joined the Russian flotilla over the past three weeks. On Thursday, the Russian Ministry of Defense upped the ante; state-run Russian news agency TASS said the ministry had announced that its forces would carryout a military exercise in the Mediterranean involving 25 naval vessels and 30 warplanes on Sept. 1. Moscow has repeatedly alleged that Syrian rebels are preparing a chemical weapons attack in Idlib as a provocation to bring a Western attack on Syrian forces. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said the naval buildup was connected to that prospect. “The United States and its allies have forced Russia to send a powerful sailing group to the Mediterranean,” it wrote on Tuesday.

State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert called the Russian reports “false-flag-type reporting.”

“We’ve seen that before where they try to put the blame – they try to put the onus on other groups and we don’t buy into that,” she said Wednesday during a regular briefing with reporters in Washington. Western countries and independent analysts say Syrian government forces have carried out a number of chemical attacks over the course of the seven-year civil war. The U.S. has vowed to respond if Syrian forces use chemical weapons in Idlib. Western countries carried out strikes on Syrian government forces after an alleged chemical attack earlier this year.

 

Germany Declares Independence From America

Germany Declares Independence From America(Source thetrumpet.com) Germany’s foreign minister declared independence from the United States this week. Europe, he said, should form a “counterweight” to the U.S., opposing America whenever it “crosses red lines.”

Writing in Germany’s Handlesblatt newspaper, he warned that Germany couldn’t be this counterweight alone. “The main goal of our foreign policy is therefore to build a sovereign, strong Europe,” he wrote. He called for European independence in practical ways; he wants to make Europe’s financial system much less dependent on the U.S. The article made waves in Germany and around the world. Handlesblatt called it “a break with 70 years of German foreign policy.” This article comes as Germany is taking actions opposing the U.S. America is placing sanctions on Turkey, while Germany is trying to help Turkey survive them. America is putting sanctions on Iran; Europe is trying to help Iran find ways to keep trading with the world. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with Russian President Vladimir Putin last weekend, they discussed rebuilding Syria—without the U.S.

We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in Germany’s political alignment.

Time has come for Russia to finally ditch US dollar – Foreign Ministry (Source RT) Russia will definitely respond to Washington’s latest sanctions and, in particular, it is accelerating efforts to abandon the American currency in trade transactions, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. “The time has come when we need to go from words to actions, and get rid of the dollar as a means of mutual settlements, and look for other alternatives,” he said in an interview with International Affairs magazine.

“Thank God, this is happening, and we will speed up this work,” Ryabkov said, explaining the move would come in addition to other “retaliatory measures” as a response to a growing list of US sanctions. Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak recently noted that a growing number of countries are interested in replacing the dollar as a medium in global oil trades and other transactions.

“There is a common understanding that we need to move towards the use of national currencies in our settlements. There is a need for this, as well as the wish of the parties,” Novak said. According to the minister, it concerns both Turkey and Iran. “We are considering an option of payment in national currencies with them. This requires certain adjustments in the financial, economic, and banking sectors” to accomplish. Last week, the Kremlin said it is interested in trading with Ankara using the Russian ruble and the Turkish lira. India has also vowed to pay for Iranian oil in rupees. The world’s second-largest economy, China, has also been taking steps to challenge the greenback’s dominance with the launch of an oil futures contract backed by Chinese currency, the petro-yuan. China and Iran have already agreed stop using the dollar in global trade.

America Is Not Prepared for Nuclear War, Public Health Experts Warn

America Is Not Prepared for Nuclear War, Public Health Experts Warn (Source motherboard.vice.com)

North Korea has nuclear weapons and the world is closer to nuclear war now than it has since the Cold War—and Americans are not ready for the fallout, experts say. As first reported by Nature, America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a meeting of health experts to discuss America’s ability to respond to the public health crisis that would follow a (hypothetical) nuclear detonation. The conclusion was grim. “Now that thermonuclear [weaponry] is back on the table, we’re back to people saying, ‘We can’t deal with this,’” Cham Dallas, a public health researcher at the University of Georgia, told Nature. Health care professionals across America need to fill in the knowledge gaps around radiological threats and burn wounds. Tener Veenema, a disaster nursing expert from Johns Hopkins, said the gathering was “an acknowledgement that the threat picture has changed, and that the risk of this happening has gone up.”

The US and its allies used to study the world’s ability to deal with an atomic blast, but that changed after the Cold War ended and tensions eased with Russia. Stategists started to think that the next nuclear attack might come from smaller bombs developed from stolen or lost fissile material.

Then North Korea changed the game in 2006 when it successfully detonated a nuclear bomb and put everyone back on Cold-War footing. To get an idea of what the fallout of a nuclear attack might look like, experts often look to past crises: how Japan dealt with the Fukushima reactor meltdown in 2011, and how Russia dealt with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The problems of wrecked infrastructure and millions dead are immediate, but the irradiated zones around the blast are a public health problem that lingers for years.