As we enter the second half of 2015, financial panic has gripped most of the globe. Stock prices are crashing in China, in Europe and in the United States. Greece is on the verge of a historic default, and now Puerto Rico and Ukraine are both threatening to default on their debts if they do not receive concessions from their creditors. Not since the financial crisis of 2008 has so much financial chaos been unleashed all at once. Could it be possible that the great financial crisis of 2015 has begun? The following are 16 facts about the tremendous financial devastation that is happening all over the world right now...

1. On Monday, the Dow fell by 350 points. That was the biggest one day decline that we have seen in two years.

2. In Europe, stocks got absolutely smashed. Germany's DAX index dropped 3.6 percent, and France's CAC 40 was down 3.7 percent.

3. After Greece, Italy is considered to be the most financially troubled nation in the eurozone, and on Monday Italian stocks were down more than 5 percent.

4. Greek stocks were down an astounding 18 percent on Monday.

On Sunday the people of Greece can hit back at the eurozone's busted economic system that is slowly strangling them. Their battle is ours too

Europe's top politicians agree that the Greeks will vote this Sunday on one of the most important questions facing any nation. Yet they can't settle what that question actually is. For Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, it is about whether his people will tolerate any more "strict and humiliating austerity". Not so, says Germany's Angela Merkel. She reckons the Greeks are choosing between staying in the euro and returning to the drachma. The stakes are raised higher still by the boss of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker: come next weekend, "the whole planet" will find out whether Greece wants to remain in Europe.

All of these may be correct, but each swerves the central importance of the moment. The reason to watch Greece this week is because a population of 11 million will hold a contest that the rest of us may one day also get to stage: a fight between democracy, and a broken political and economic system.

That battle - between what people want and what their rulers force down their throats, supposedly for their own good - can be glimpsed at every dramatic moment in Greece's recent history.

It was already there in spring 2010, when the then prime minister, George Papandreou, begged Merkel not to crush his country with austerity, and she coolly replied: "We want to make sure nobody else will want this." It marched into clear view in summer 2011 as ordinary Greeks swarmed cities demanding an alternative to their venal political elite and the Eurocrats and financiers who pulled the strings.

Three prisoners—Melvin Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl Council—who led work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014 as part of the Free Alabama Movement have spent the last 18 months in solitary confinement. Authorities, unnerved by the protests that engulfed three prisons in the state, as well as by videos and pictures of abusive conditions smuggled out by the movement, say the men will remain in solitary confinement indefinitely.

The prison strike leaders are denied televisions and reading material. They spend at least three days a week, sometimes longer, without leaving their tiny isolation cells. They eat their meals seated on their steel toilets. They are allowed to shower only once every two days despite temperatures that routinely rise above 90 degrees.

The men have become symbols of a growing resistance movement inside American prisons. The prisoners' work stoppages and refusal to co-operate with authorities in Alabama are modeled on actions that shook the Georgia prison system in December 2010. The strike leaders argue that this is the only mechanism left to the 2.3 million prisoners across America. By refusing to work—a tactic that would force prison authorities to hire compensated labor or to induce the prisoners to return to their jobs by paying a fair wage—the neoslavery that defines the prison system can be broken. Prisoners are currently organizing in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

There can be no surprise that the UN Human Rights Council's independent investigation of Israel's assault on Gaza last summer found evidence of massive and systematic war crimes.

Its report, published Monday in Geneva, says investigators were "able to gather substantial information pointing to serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law by Israel and by Palestinian armed groups."

"The extent of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza was unprecedented and will impact generations to come," the chair of the investigation commission, Justice Mary McGowan Davis told media, adding that "there is also ongoing fear in Israel among communities who come under regular threat."

Despite the "balanced" language that is now the habitual refuge of international officials hoping to avoid false accusations of anti-Israel bias, the evidence shows that the scale and impact of Israeli violence dwarfs anything allegedly done by Palestinians.

Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko requests the supreme court of Ukraine to declare that his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown by an illegal operation; in other words, that the post-Yanukovych government, including Poroshenko's own Presidency, came into power from a coup, not from something democratic, not from any authentic constitutional process at all.

In a remarkable document, which is not posted at the English version of the website of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, but which is widely reported outside the United States, including Russia, Poroshenko, in Ukrainian (not in English), has petitioned the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (as it is being widely quoted in English):

"I ask the court to acknowledge that the law 'on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych' as unconstitutional."

I had previously reported, and here will excerpt, Poroshenko's having himself admitted prior to 26 February 2014, to the EU's investigator, and right after the February 22nd overthrow of Yanukovych, that the overthrow was a coup, and that it was even a false-flag operation, in which the snipers, who were dressed as if they were Ukrainian Security Bureau troops, were actually not, and that, as the EU's investigator put his finding to the EU's chief of foreign affairs Catherine Ashton [and with my explanatory annotations here]:

"the same oligarch [Poroshenko — and so when he became President he already knew this] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who had just said that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides [so, Poroshenko himself knows that his regime is based on a false-flag U.S.-controlled coup d'etat against his predecessor]. ... Behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition."

We all remember how, in early June, President Putin announced that Russia would deploy more than 40 new ICBMs "able to overcome even the most technically advanced anti-missile defense systems."

Oh dear; the Pentagon and their European minions have been freaking out on overdrive ever since.

First was NATO Secretary-General, Norwegian figurehead Jens Stoltenberg, who condemned it as "nuclear saber rattling."

Then there's Lt. Gen. Stephen Wilson, the head of US Global Air Strike Command - as in the man responsible for US ICBMs and nuclear bombers - at a recent briefing in London; "[They've] annexed a country, changing international borders, raising rhetoric unlike we've heard since the cold war times..."

That set up the stage for the required Nazi parallel; "Some of the actions by Russia recently we haven't seen since the 1930s, when whole countries were annexed and borders were changed by decree."

At His Masters Voice's command, the EU duly extended economic sanctions against Russia.And right on cue, Pentagon supremo Ashton Carter, out of Berlin, declared that NATO must stand up against - what else - "Russian aggression" and "their attempts to re-establish a Soviet-era sphere of influence."

Bets are off on what this huffin' and puffin' is all about. It could be about Russia daring to build a whole country close to so many NATO bases. It could be about a bunch of nutters itching to start a war on European soil to ultimately "liberate" all that precious oil, gas and minerals from Russia and the Central Asian "stans".

Unfortunately, the whole thing is deadly serious.

We were business people doing business in Libya since 2007 January. We made a unique enzyme that rejuvenates oil wells and cleans up sludge pits, cleans out pipelines and tanks and does a whole lot of neat things to oil. We booked a huge amount of business in Libya from 2007 to 2011: 5 billion dollars worth of our product. We signed a JV with the Social Security Investment Fund of Janzour near Tripoli, Libya. We actively began to build a production facility to fulfill these contracts for our enzyme when the so called Libyan revolution began in February of 2011.

I would like to note that the Libyan people were not in any way extremist Muslims. The part of the Koran that was added by the Ayatollah Khomeini talking about killing infidels was thrown out of Libya by Ghadafi because he said it was not part of the Koran. For this there was a fatwa or death order put on Ghadafi for over 20 years by the radical extremist Muslims. All religions with a book were allowed in Libya. Women were emancipated in the 1970s by Ghadafi. No special clothing were required and all women were highly educated if they choose to be. They were doctors, lawyers, ministers, business owners, or just house wives whatever they decided.

Libya shared ½ of all the its oil revenue with its 5.5 million population. All medical care was free, if you could not get the care you needed in Libya then you could travel wherever you needed with a family member and all costs and expenses were fully paid. Education was free and if you wanted to go outside to another University that was paid in full with a stipend. When a Libyan couple got married they received a $46,000 gift from the government to start their lives. Their first home, a 2,500 sq foot condominium cost 10% of their salary for 20 years and then it was theirs. Gasoline was 44 cents a gallon, all utilities were free. If you were hungry and had no money they had huge stores of food where you could get rice, milk, cheese, flour and money to buy meat. The average salary in Libya was the highest in Africa, higher than China or India at $15,800 a year. If you had a college education and could not find a job you received that money until you found a job.

Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.

Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100 years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural extinction rates, the researchers said.

Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said.

"Our activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the history of life on Earth," said lead researcher Gerardo Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Ceballos said that, ever since he was a child, he struggled to understand why certain animals went extinct. In the new study, he and his colleagues focused on the extinction rates of vertebrates, which include mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes.

First, they needed to establish how many species go extinct naturally over time. They used data from a 2011 study in the journal Nature showing that typically, the world has two extinctions per 10,000 vertebrate species every 100 years. That study based its estimate on fossil and historical records.

Moreover, that background extinction rate, the researchers found, was higher than that found in other studies, which tend to report half that rate, the researchers said.

Then, Ceballos and his colleagues calculated the modern extinction rate. They used data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international organization that tracks threatened and endangered species. The 2014 IUCN Red List gave them the number of extinct and possibly extinct vertebrate species since 1500.

Had a black person or a Muslim carried out the Charleston shooting, the media narrative would have been completely different and much of the blame has to do with US public policy, says Solomon Comissiong, host and founder of Your World News Radio Show.

On Wednesday 9 African-Americans were killed in a church in South Carolina, allegedly by a white man named Dylann Storm Roof. The attack took place during evening prayers at the city's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, one of the oldest in the United States which has one of the largest black congregations in the south. Nevertheless, US officials and the President do not seem to see any hate crime in this story.

Is America colorblind only when covering crimes involving whites? For more on this, RT's show "In the Now" talked to Solomon Comissiong, host and founder of Your World News Radio Show.

Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.

What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.

In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked "Confidential" Soros outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, "A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine," the memo from Soros calls for steps to "restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement." To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes that "General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added—f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement."