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FILE PHOTO: A general view of The Houses of Parliament in London November 9, 2006. REUTERS/Kieran Doherty/File Photo
April 4, 2019
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s parliament was forced to close early on Thursday after a leak in the 19th century Gothic palace caused water to rain down into the debating chamber.
Lawmakers were debating tax policy when water began cascading into the press area overlooking lawmakers’ seats, forcing Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle to suspend the session.
Speaking over the noise of pouring water, Member of Parliament Justin Madders, said: “I hope I can complete my speech before rain stops play. I think there is probably some kind of symbol, about how many people view how broken parliament is, going on there.”
Thursday’s sitting in the lower chamber, the House of Commons, was then ended more than two hours early. The upper chamber, the House of Lords, continued to debate Brexit in a separate part of the building.
The Palace of Westminster – parts of which date back to 1097 – has been slipping into disrepair for decades, requiring frequent repairs and upgrades. Much of the crumbling limestone exterior is clad in scaffolding.
Plans are being made for a multi-billion pound restoration program which could require parliament to be temporarily relocated to a separate building, but the process has been delayed, with many lawmakers opposed to giving up their traditional setting.
(Reporting by William James and Kylie MacLellan; editing by Stephen Addison)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump talks with Energy Secretary Rick Perry after delivering remarks during an “Unleashing American Energy” event at the Department of Energy in Washington, U.S., June 29, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
April 4, 2019
By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The flagship of the Trump administration’s advanced nuclear power research program could cost about 40 percent more than a government official estimated earlier this year, a U.S. Department of Energy document shows.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry has tried to breathe life into the country’s nuclear power industry, which is suffering in the face of competition from plants burning cheap natural gas as well as falling costs for wind and solar power.
Perry announced the versatile test reactor, or VTR, in late February, saying it was a “key step to implementing President (Donald) Trump’s direction to revitalize and expand the U.S. nuclear industry,” and critical for national security.
The VTR would allow U.S. companies to conduct advanced technology and fuels tests without having to go to competitors in Russia and China, Perry said. Meant to be built by late 2025, it would be the first new nuclear test reactor built by the Energy Department, or DOE, in many decades.
Perry did not put a price on the reactor, which would be led by the department’s Idaho National Laboratory. But an internal DOE document dated Jan. 22, obtained by public policy group the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) through a freedom of information request, puts the estimated cost for construction and starting the VTR at $3.9 billion to $6 billion. The document, seen by Reuters on Thursday, had not been reported previously.
The high end of that range is nearly 42 percent more than an estimate by Kemal Pasamehmetoglu, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory’s VTR program, who was quoted in the Morning Consult news outlet in February saying it would cost up to $3.5 billion in today’s dollars.
The UCS estimated that VTR’s cost for the next seven years would be about $550 million to $850 million annually, compared to the $740 million appropriated in the fiscal year 2019 budget for the department’s entire advanced nuclear technology development, which contained just $65 million for VTR.
If successful, the VTR is meant to lead to a new wave of so-called fast reactors, reviving nuclear power companies. Fast reactors breed their own fuel, unlike today’s fleet of light water reactors. They also have a safety benefit of allowing a plant to operate under low pressure conditions.
But critics worry that the fuel cycle of fast reactors will likely depend on the reprocessing or recycling of plutonium or uranium, both of which can be used as fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
“Fast reactors are less safe, less secure, and more proliferation-prone than light-water reactors,” said Ed Lyman, a senior scientist at UCS. “The DOE should not be asking taxpayers to spend billions on this dangerous reactor.”
Lyman also said cheaper approaches to advanced nuclear power could be developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the DOE-sponsored research and development center in Tennessee.
The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
VTR has already led to business for nuclear companies. In November, the Idaho lab said it had contracted GE Hitachi Nuclear, a venture between General Electric Co and Hitachi Ltd, to support the conceptual design and safety activities for an unspecified amount.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Tom Brown)
Source: OANN
A fragment of a planet that has survived the death of its star has been discovered by University of Warwick astronomers in a disc of debris formed from destroyed planets, which the star ultimately consumes.
The iron and nickel rich planetesimal survived a system-wide cataclysm that followed the death of its host star, SDSS J122859.93+104032.9. Believed to have once been part of a larger planet, its survival is all the more astonishing as it orbits closer to its star than previously thought possible, going around it once every two hours.
The discovery, reported in the journal Science, is the first time that scientists have used spectroscopy to discover a solid body in orbit around a white dwarf, using subtle variations in the emitted light to identify additional gas that the planetesimal is generating.
Using the Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, the scientists studied a debris disc orbiting a white dwarf 410 light years away, formed by the disruption of rocky bodies composed of elements such as iron, magnesium, silicon, and oxygen – the four key building blocks of the Earth and most rocky bodies. Within that disc they discovered a ring of gas streaming from a solid body, like a comet’s tail. This gas could either be generated by the body itself or by evaporating dust as it collides with small debris within the disc.
The astronomers estimate that this body has to be at least a kilometer in size, but could be as large as a few hundred kilometers in diameter, comparable to the largest asteroids known in our Solar System.
White dwarfs are the remains of stars like our sun that have burnt all their fuel and shed their outer layers, leaving behind a dense core which slowly cools over time. This particular star has shrunk so dramatically that the planetesimal orbits within its sun’s original radius. Evidence suggests that it was once part of a larger body further out in its solar system and is likely to have been a planet torn apart as the star began its cooling process.
Alex Jones discusses the terraforming operation being carried out by world elites who are racing to implement the deadliest weather modifying weapon to prepare the planet for extreme depopulation.
Lead author Dr. Christopher Manser, a Research Fellow in the Department of Physics, said: “The star would have originally been about two solar masses, but now the white dwarf is only 70% of the mass of our Sun. It is also very small – roughly the size of the Earth – and this makes the star, and in general all white dwarfs, extremely dense.
“The white dwarf’s gravity is so strong – about 100,000 times that of the Earth’s – that a typical asteroid will be ripped apart by gravitational forces if it passes too close to the white dwarf.”
Professor Boris Gaensicke, co-author from the Department of Physics, adds: “The planetesimal we have discovered is deep into the gravitational well of the white dwarf, much closer to it than we would expect to find anything still alive. That is only possible because it must be very dense and/or very likely to have internal strength that holds it together, so we propose that it is composed largely of iron and nickel.
“If it was pure iron it could survive where it lives now, but equally it could be a body that is rich in iron but with internal strength to hold it together, which is consistent with the planetesimal being a fairly massive fragment of a planet core. If correct, the original body was at least hundreds of kilometers in diameter because it is only at that point planets begin to differentiate – like oil on water – and have heavier elements sink to form a metallic core.”
The discovery offers a hint as to what planets may reside in other solar systems, and a glimpse into the future of our own.
Dr. Christopher Manser said: “As stars age they grow into red giants, which ‘clean out’ much of the inner part of their planetary system. In our Solar System, the Sun will expand up to where the Earth currently orbits, and will wipe out Earth, Mercury, and Venus. Mars and beyond will survive and will move further out.
“The general consensus is that 5-6 billion years from now, our Solar System will be a white dwarf in place of the Sun, orbited by Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the outer planets, as well as asteroids and comets. Gravitational interactions are likely to happen in such remnants of planetary systems, meaning the bigger planets can easily nudge the smaller bodies onto an orbit that takes them close to the white dwarf, where they get shredded by its enormous gravity.
“Learning about the masses of asteroids, or planetary fragments that can reach a white dwarf can tell us something about the planets that we know must be further out in this system, but we currently have no way to detect.
“Our discovery is only the second solid planetesimal found in a tight orbit around a white dwarf, with the previous one found because debris passing in front of the star blocked some of its light – that is the “transit method” widely used to discover exoplanets around Sun-like stars. To find such transits, the geometry under which we view them has to be very finely tuned, which means that each system observed for several hours mostly leads to nothing. The spectroscopic method we developed in this research can detect close-in planetesimals without the need for a specific alignment. We already know of several other systems with debris discs very similar to SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, which we will study next. We are confident that we will discover additional planetesimals orbiting white dwarfs, which will then allow us to learn more about their general properties.”
President Trump spoke out many times about the dangers of vaccinating young children before he became president. Alex exposes the globalist agenda to use vaccines for population control.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: A surfer rides on an artificial wave during the opening of a surfing pool in central Vienna, Austria, June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader
April 4, 2019
(Reuters) – Landlocked Mongolia has become the latest country to join the International Surfing Association, taking the world body’s total membership to 106 nations on five continents.
Surfing, which traditionally needs only a beach and some waves, can now be enjoyed inland and even indoors thanks to wave machines and is due to make its Olympic debut in Tokyo next year.
The sport is also on the program for the 2020 Asian Beach Games, in Sanya, China.
“The growth of surfing in non-traditional surfing nations is testimony to how surfing’s Olympic inclusion has expanded the sport to new corners of the globe,” said ISA president Fernando Aguerre in a statement.
“Surfers that thought the Games were far out of reach, now have a tangible dream that they can pursue.”
The ISA said the Mongolian federation, recognized by the country’s National Olympic Committee, could now organize indoor surfing competitions using wave pool technology and set up a network of surfing clubs.
It will also develop disciplines that can be practiced on flat water, such as StandUp Paddle.
Mongolia Surfing Federation (MSF) President Tamir Amarbayasgalan said in the ISA statement that membership was “a crucial step toward promoting and popularizing the sport of Surfing in Mongolia.
“This creates an opportunity for us to field a national team to compete at the ISA’s international competitions. The MSF has created a platform that will allow surfers to get information and become a part of the worldwide surfing community.”
Oman, which held its first surf contest in August last year, also joined the ISA as a member.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Christian Radnedge)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Sports columnist Rick Reilly listens to a question about efforts to raise funding for bed nets to help prevent malaria deaths in Africa, during a news conference at United Nations headquarters, in New York, April 23, 2008. REUTERS/Chip East (UNITED STATES)
April 4, 2019
By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – For Donald Trump, the rigid rules of golf are flexible, allowing for the kick of a wayward ball into a better location, skipping a putt that looks close enough. What’s the big deal?
That is according to Rick Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist who has just written the book “Commander in Cheat,” which alleges Trump is guilty of all sorts of sins on the golf course.
In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Reilly laid out a number of accusations to support his view that the U.S. president’s golf game is, well, not par for the course, particularly for a president who owns a string of golf resorts.
Among the charges: Playing with pros Tiger Woods, Dustin Johnson and Brad Faxon in November 2017, Trump hit two balls in the water on one hole but didn’t charge himself any penalty strokes.
The pros all saw it happen, but just grinned their way through it. Why didn’t they call him out for the violation?
“Because he’s so fun and we want our own stories to tell about the cheating,” Reilly said he was told.
At Winged Foot, a famous golf club in Westchester County, New York, Trump had a reputation among the caddies for kicking his ball into a better position so often that they called him “Pele,” the former soccer star, Reilly said.
While Trump has in the past claimed a golf handicap of 2.8, meaning he typically will average three strokes over par over 18 holes, his handicap is actually about 10, said Reilly.
“This idea that Donald Trump is a great golfer – he’s not,” said Reilly. “He’s good. He’s a 72-year-old man who’s a 10 handicap. That’s pretty good. But why isn’t that good enough?”
One time Democrat Hillary Clinton, who Trump defeated in the 2016 election, had her brother, Hugh Rodham, to play a round at Winged Foot but showed up wearing shorts and was told he had to have long pants, Reilly said.
Rodham ended up wearing Trump’s rain pants in order to meet the dress code, and gave them back when he was done. This didn’t sit well with Trump when he found out about it.
“Somebody tells Trump this and he was so mad he made the club buy him a whole new rain suit,” said Reilly.
Reilly said the point of the book is to show what Trump is really like behind the scenes.
“Golf is a window into a guy’s soul and this gives a pretty good view of the guy,” he said.
The White House declined to comment.
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Susan Thomas)
Source: OANN
While water is perceived to be one of the simplest substances in the world, modeling its behavior on the atomic or molecular level has frustrated scientists for decades.
To date, no single model has been able to accurately represent the plethora of water’s singular characteristics, including the fact that it is densest at a temperature slightly higher than its melting point.
A new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has achieved a breakthrough in the effort to mathematically represent how water behaves. To do so, Argonne researchers used machine learning to develop a new, computationally inexpensive water model that more accurately represents the thermodynamic properties of water, including how water changes to ice at the molecular scale.
In the study, researchers at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) used a machine learning workflow to optimize a new molecular model of water. They trained their model against extensive experimental data to generate a highly accurate molecular-scale model of water’s properties. The CNM is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.
Optimizing model parameters for water has long been a challenge, and more than 50 different water models currently exist, according to Argonne nanoscientist Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, the study’s corresponding author.
“We are trying to understand how to navigate the complex parameter space for any given model in order to capture a wide spectrum of water’s properties, which is extremely difficult,” Sankaranarayanan explained. “There is no existing model that can account for water’s melting point, its density maximum and the density of ice, all at the same time.”
Trying to create quantum mechanical or atomistic models to capture water’s behavior had flummoxed researchers because they are so computationally intensive and still fail to reproduce many temperature-dependent properties of water. According to Henry Chan, Argonne postdoctoral researcher and the lead author of the study, this is even more difficult to achieve for simple models, such as the one used in this study.
A new report exposes the chemical Atrazine, a widely use pesticide, has been found in the Texas water supply.
For the researchers, the choice to use entire water molecules as the fundamental unit in the model allowed them to perform the simulation at low computational cost.
“While traditionally these simple models introduce a number of approximations and often suffer from poor accuracy, machine learning allows us to create a much more accurate model while maintaining simplicity,” said University of Louisville assistant professor Badri Narayanan, a co-first author of the study.
However, even with this reduced computational expense, some physical properties can be difficult to simulate without large-scale supercomputers. The team used the Mira supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, to perform simulations of up to 8 million water molecules to study the growth and formation of interfaces in polycrystalline ice.
According to co-first author and CNM assistant scientist Mathew Cherukara, this new model, termed “coarse-grained,” achieves a fidelity on par with models that incorporate an atomic-level description. “Traditionally, you would think that introducing these approximations would typically result in a far worse model — one that’s efficient but that does not perform very well,” he said. “The beauty is that this molecular model has no right to be as accurate as the atomistic models, but still ends up being so.”
To achieve the high accuracy of the coarse-grained model, the researchers trained the model using information drawn from nearly a billion atomic-scale configurations involving temperature-dependent properties that are well known. “Essentially, we said to our model, ‘look, this is what the properties are,’ and asked it to give us parameters that were able to reproduce them,” Chan said.
Training the model involved what Chan called a “hierarchical approach,” in which each candidate model was put through a series of tests or evaluations, starting with basic essential properties before working its way up to more complex ones. “You can think of it like trying to teach a child a skill,” Chan said. “You start with something fundamental and work your way up once you see progress.”
The researchers also showed that their approach could be used to improve the performance of other existing atomistic and molecular models. “We were able to significantly improve the performance of existing high-quality water models using our hierarchical approach. In principle, we should be able to revisit all molecular models and help each one of them attain their best performance,” Sankaranarayanan said.
Alex Jones breaks down how the globalists are attempting to collapse civilization within the next six months by intensifying their migrant fueled destabilization of the west alongside the chemical castration of the population.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: A Chevron refinery is seen on Burrard Inlet in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada November 18, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Helgren
April 4, 2019
By Nia Williams
CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday dismissed all claims attempting to force Chevron Corp’s Canadian unit to pay a $9.5 billion judgment handed down in Ecuador against the U.S. oil major over pollution in the Andean country.
The ruling draws a line under attempts to sue Chevron through its Canadian unit.
Residents of Ecuador’s Lago Agrio region have been trying to force Chevron to pay for water and soil contamination caused from 1964 to 1992 by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001.
The villagers obtained a judgment against Chevron in Ecuador in 2011. But the company has no assets in the country, and the villagers have been trying to sue it in the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina to enforce the decision.
The Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in 2017 that Chevron Canada is a separate entity to its parent company and its shares and assets could not be seized by those seeking to enforce the Ecuadorian judgment.
Canada’s highest court rejected a request to review that decision, which is now final.
“Any further efforts by the plaintiffs’ lawyers to continue this lawsuit in Canada would be an abuse of the country’s legal system and a waste of its judicial resources,” said R. Hewitt Pate, Chevron’s vice president and general counsel.
The decision comes after an international tribunal last year unanimously ruled that the pollution judgment by Ecuador’s Supreme Court against Chevron was procured through fraud, bribery and corruption.
Texaco was released from liability through a settlement with Ecuador years earlier, the tribunal found.
(Editing by David Gregorio)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Trucks wait in a long queue at border customs control to cross into the U.S., at the Otay border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico April 3, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso/File Photo
April 4, 2019
By Jose Luis Gonzalez and Sharay Angulo
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexican exporters are looking into sending their goods to the United States by air freight to avoid a five-mile-long line of trucks at the border caused by the Trump administration moving federal agents away from customs checks to immigration duties.
Autoparts and medical equipment makers were among the companies considering the more expensive air cargo to avoid incurring penalties for late delivery to U.S. clients, or factory closures, Luis Aguirre, the president of Mexico’s manufacturing industry chamber INDEX, said late on Wednesday.
At least one autopart plant has already had to close a production line in Ciudad Juarez because of the export delays, despite some traffic shifting to smaller, nearby ports of entry, Aguirre said. He did not say which company had been affected.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this, in all the time I have worked here,” said truck driver Juan Sandoval, who joined the line before dawn on Thursday, the fourth day of huge truck lines at the border.
Sandoval said the Ciudad Juarez alarm manufacturer he works for had cut deliveries by half to four trucks a day because of the border delays.
Authorities in Ciudad Juarez have installed brightly colored pink and blue portable washrooms along the line, and were handing out drinking water to truckers, some of whom slept in their cabs overnight.
Washington’s decision to move some 750 border agents from commercial to immigration duties to handle a surge in families seeking asylum between border crossings has triggered long delays for cross-border traffic at Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Otay Mesa, some of the busiest ports on the border.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump reiterated a threat to close the border, or parts of it, saying Congress could avert such a shutdown by changing laws to fix what he called immigration “loopholes.”
Business leaders on both sides of the border say a shutdown would hurt supply chains and $1.7 billion in daily trade at some of the world’s busiest land crossings.
“Trump is seeking re-election, and clearly the threats about the increase in immigrants is political,” said Aguirre, adding that Mexican companies would argue at a major U.S.-Mexico forum next week that immigration and trade should be treated separately.
(Additional reporting by Julio-Cesar Chavez in El Paso and Sharay Angulo in Mexico City; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Alistair Bell)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Pipe assembly is pictured aboard the NordStream 2 pipe laying vessel Audacia close to Ruegen island in the Baltic Sea, Germany, November 13, 2018. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt/File Photo
April 4, 2019
By Madeline Chambers
BERLIN (Reuters) – Keen to use its presidency of the U.N. Security Council to demonstrate its commitment to multilateralism, Germany has laid itself bare to criticism from disenchanted allies of double standards on defense spending, energy and arms exports.
Powerful business interests and the compromises needed to hold together conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel’s loveless coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) have led to go-it-alone decisions that have angered the United States, France, Britain and other Europeans.
Merkel won plaudits in Davos in January and a standing ovation at the Munich Security Conference in February for strong appeals to maintain the post-World War Two rules-based international order.
Her SPD foreign minister, Heiko Maas, is singing from the same hymn sheet.
“When faced with a new order in which great-power rivalry is back on the agenda, our response shouldn’t be: my country first. It should be a close alliance of all those committed to a rules-based international order,” he said in New York this week.
Such rhetoric rings hollow for some.
An unwavering commitment to the NordStream 2 gas pipeline from Russia has angered the United States, Ukraine and eastern European partners. A freeze on arms exports to Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi led Paris to accuse Berlin of jeopardizing joint tank, combat jet and drone development.
Germany’s long insistence on austerity and refusal to rein in its large current account surplus, which reflects its export prowess, have perpetuated a view among euro zone peers that they must play to Berlin’s tune.
“IN DENIAL”
Berlin has also exasperated close allies by pouring cold water on deeper euro zone reform ideas from France, and especially by rowing back on NATO defense spending goals.
Not to mention Merkel’s unilateral disavowal of EU rules in 2015 which let migrants enter Germany, a move which most commentators say contributed to the rise of the far right.
Constanze Stelzenmueller, senior Robert Bosch Fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it is an “ultimately misguided and only semi-functional attempt” to articulate a foreign policy opposed to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” stance.
“No other country has been so deeply in denial about the tension between its high-minded normative convictions and its own selective compliance with them,” she said, adding that other European countries are looking to Germany for leadership.
“Germany today is – for all its wealth and power, including soft power – also increasingly lonely, overwhelmed and beset by internal rifts,” she said, adding it risked being shaped by events, competitors and adversaries.
In its one-month presidency of the U.N. Security Council which started on Monday, the spotlight will be on Germany if any Security Council response is needed to global crises.
But with the legacy of the Nazi era and World War Two still weighing on it, Germany is wary of being seen as too assertive on the world stage. As it struggles to find a role to match its economic might, its foreign policy is deeply embedded in international bodies such as the EU, NATO and United Nations.
CREDIBILITY AT STAKE
So why, ask critics, did SPD Finance Minister Olaf Scholz last month announce plans which mean Germany will fall even shorter of a NATO goal of spending 2 percent of economic output on defense in coming years than it was previously going to?
Having previously said it would reach 1.5 percent by 2024, Scholz’s plans now see a decrease to 1.25 percent of gross domestic product by 2023.
“It doesn’t serve German credibility if we start questioning the goal of 1.5 percent by 2024 after committing to the 2 percent goal in 2014,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a senior lawmaker in Merkel’s conservative party.
It gives ammunition to Trump, who singles out Germany for “not paying its fair share”. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said this week Germany was a top offender, pointing out it had for generations benefited from U.S. protection of Europe.
“Whether Scholz is pandering to his own pacifist wing of his party or its anti-Americanism base, or has his sights on the chancellery, Germany’s credibility inside NATO is being dented,” wrote Judy Dempsey, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe.
The government insists it is committed to the 2024 goal. Maas says Germany has raised defense spending by nearly 40 percent since 2014 and the defense budget will continue to rise — but the debate exposes a classic German dilemma.
“After World War Two and the Nazi era, it’s in our political DNA that military solutions are almost never the answer, rather political solutions,” said senior SPD lawmaker Thomas Oppermann.
Another major driving force is business.
Berlin has long sought to protect its powerful car industry from EU attempts to curb emissions and has also dug in its heels in over a pipeline that will secure supplies of Russian gas needed by German industry – and bypass Ukraine.
Brushing aside opposition from the United States, eastern European and Baltic states who warn that Europe will become over dependent on Russian energy, Merkel has let firms, including Uniper and BASF’s Winterhall unit, push ahead with NordStream 2.
Even after the EU imposed sanctions on Russia for annexing Crimea in 2014, Merkel insisted it was a commercial project and only last year acknowledged it had a political element and saw the need to reassure Ukraine on transit revenues.
“Allowing it to trundle along was a mix of business driving it hard and the government taking its hands off, hoping for the best – and that turned out not to be,” said Stelzenmueller.
One other factor affecting policy is Merkel’s reliance on the SPD as a coalition partner, seen in last week’s extension of an arms exports ban to Saudi Arabia.
The original ban last year, which took European partners by surprise, prompted London and Paris to warn that billions of euros of military orders were in danger.
While the SPD, seeking to win over traditional voters for regional and European elections later this year, insisted on extending the ban, they bowed to pressure from France and Britain and allowed loopholes for joint projects.
However, if Merkel is to fulfil her aim of joint European development and export of defense equipment, she may have to convince Germans to change their mindset.
“It won’t work if Germany says we are passionate Europeans but only on our terms. We must get used to the idea that we have to compromise,” said Oppermann.
(Additional reporting by Paul Carrel; Editing by Alison Williams)
Source: OANN
In 2011, 6-year-old Timmothy Pitzen’s mother picked him up at school in Illinois, took him to the zoo and a water park, and then killed herself at a hotel, leaving a note in which she said her son was fine but that no one would ever find him.
On Wednesday, a 14-year-old boy came forward to tell authorities he is Timmothy.
The boy claimed he escaped from two kidnappers in the Cincinnati area and then fled across a bridge into Kentucky.
Authorities from Timmothy’s hometown of Aurora, Illinois, are now checking out the teenager’s story.
“We’ve probably had thousands of tips of him popping up in different areas,” Aurora police Sgt. Bill Rowley said. “We have no idea what we’re driving down there for. It could be Pitzen. It could be a hoax.”
Timmothy Pitzen’s grandmother, Alana Anderson, told WISN-TV Wednesday that authorities have told the family “very little.”
“We just know a 14-year-old boy was found and went to the police,” Anderson said. “We don’t want to get our hopes up and our family’s hopes up until we know something. We just don’t want to get our hopes up. We’ve had false reports and false hopes before.”
Police in the Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville wrote in a short incident report that the boy said Wednesday morning that he had “just escaped from two kidnappers” he described as white men with body builder-type physiques. They were in a Ford SUV with Wisconsin license plates and had been staying at a Red Roof Inn.
Sharonville police said on the department’s Facebook page that the information about the boy’s reported escape was received by police in Campbell County, Kentucky.
“The City of Sharonville Police Department, like every other police agency in the greater Cincinnati area, was requested to check their Red Roof Inn hotels regarding this incident,” the post read. “To the best of our knowledge, we have no information indicating that the missing juvenile was ever in the City of Sharonville.”
The FBI said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that its offices in Cincinnati and in Louisville, Kentucky, were working on a missing child investigation with Aurora police and police departments in Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky, and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio. The FBI offered no other details.
The body of 43-year-old Amy Fry-Pitzen was found on May 15, 2011. Her wrists were slit. Police believe she killed herself at a hotel in Rockford, Illinois, after taking Timmothy to the zoo and a Wisconsin water park.
A note she left said Timmothy was fine but that no would ever find him. Police investigating her death said she took steps that suggest she might have dropped her son off with a friend.
At the time, police searched for Timmothy in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
Source: NewsMax America
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