Russia has written down $32 billion of Cuba's Soviet era debt. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the law ahead of his official visit to Latin America, with Havana as his first stop.

The agreement was first signed in October 2013 and draws a line under a twenty-year dispute.

Cuba is now required to pay back $3.2 billion over the next 10 years.

The first payment from Cuba is expected in October, and the money will be transferred to an account of the Russian lender Vnesheconombank opened at the National Bank of Cuba.

The agreement was signed into a law on Friday ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin's official visit to Latin America, where Cuba comes the first.

These are the men and women who are supposed to keep watch over the nation's spies. And they have no idea about the latest revelations of inappropriate NSA snooping.
The newest revelations about the National Security Agency may be shocking to the rest of us. To the congressional overseers of the American intelligence services, not so much. They're still catching up from a holiday weekend. Or maybe they've just become numb to the whole spying-on-ordinary-people thing.

Using files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the NSA scooped up the communications of innocent Internet users, including Americans, and that those not targeted by the agency far outnumber those targeted by the agency.

Personal and intimate information - details on romantic relationships, résumés, pictures - for thousands of non-targeted individuals have all been caught in the NSA's surveillance driftnet, according to the newspaper.

All of that, you might think, would be a matter of some interest to the senators who control the budgets and oversee the activities of the nation's military and intelligence agencies. Or not. Sen. Lindsey Graham - who sits on the Senate's armed services, appropriations, and judiciary committees and is one of the Republican Party's most prominent voices on defense and intelligence issues - wasn't familiar with the Post piece.

The state of Israel is ready for another war in Gaza following incidents in the Israeli-Gaza borders where it claims that numerous rockets were fired from the Gaza by terrorists groups according to the Times of Israel.

"Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz on Tuesday expressed their satisfaction with the IDF's preparedness for a possible incursion into the Gaza Strip and declared that such an attack would severely incapacitate terror groups" according to the report. The report also indicated that "their statements came amid a recent spike in the number of attacks emanating from Gaza and, subsequently, the number and intensity of Israeli retaliatory strikes."

The Israeli government is in preparation to hit the Palestinians to disable their military capabilities to attack the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in case of any future war with the Palestinians or any of its neighbors in the Middle East. It would also limit the Palestinians fighting capabilities if Israel were to launch attacks on its neighbors as in the case of Lebanon, Syria or Iran. Both Israel and Lebanon have a strenuous relationship for decades. Israel will launch strikes deep into Gaza if new peace talks fail when US Secretary of State John Kerry who is scheduled to arrive this week. Israel recently complained to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the Security Council that Lebanon committed acts of terror, including the murder of an IDF soldier by a Lebanese soldier.

A few days ago we finally closed the door on any argument who the marginal buyer in the US luxury housing segment was - the answer: Chinese oligarchs, scrambling to launder their "hot" domestic money abroad (as we predicted first two years ago) and now that Switzerland is no longer a safe offshore venue where one can park cash, they picked US luxury housing as the best money laundering alternative.
This means that far from indicating a recovery, as the recent surge in the high end of the US housing segment had long been touted, all the relentless move higher in ultraluxury properties prices was simply a recycling of China's hot money, which unlike in the US, never made its way into the Chinese stock market (explaining why the Shanghai Composite has barely budged in years) and merely ended up in US real estate. If anything, this is simply another confirmation of the epic capital misallocation, and the complete lack of "trickle down" resulting from failed global central banking policies.

So now that the "who" has been answered, just one question remained: "how?"

Canadian fighter jets will be patrolling the edge of Russian airspace starting in September when Ottawa sends six CF-18s to join air defence missions over the Baltic states as part of the NATO response to Moscow's efforts to destabilize Ukraine.

The Canadian government announced Wednesday a half-dozen warplanes will join the military alliance's Baltic air policing patrols as NATO tries to bolster allies spooked by Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula last March.

This new assignment offers a more important role for Canada in the alliance's reaction to Vladimir Putin because air policing over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are not able to carry out their own air defence, is exactly the sort of weighty role NATO was designed to play - lending stability to the security situation in Europe.


"CF-18 Hornet crews will work with NATO allies and respond to any violations of Baltic air space," the government stated.

The international revival of public ownership is anathema to our City-led elite. But it's vital to genuine economic recovery

Privatisation isn't working. We were promised a shareholding democracy, competition, falling costs and better services. A generation on, most people's experience has been the opposite. From energy to water, rail to public services, the reality has been private monopolies, perverse subsidies, exorbitant prices, woeful under-investment, profiteering and corporate capture.

Private cartels run rings round the regulators. Consumers and politicians are bamboozled by commercial secrecy and contractual complexity. Workforces have their pay and conditions slashed. Control of essential services has not only passed to corporate giants based overseas, but those companies are themselves often state-owned - they're just owned by another state.

Report after report has shown privatised services to be more expensive and inefficient than their publicly owned counterparts. It's scarcely surprising that a large majority of the public, who have never supported a single privatisation, neither trust the privateers nor want them running their services.

The mainstream media is aging and collapsing under the weight of its own hubris and arrogance. Now entirely formulaic in presentation and predictable in substance, the 'major' outlets of news, which are monopolized under only a small handful of corporations, serve the purpose of misleading the public on important issues and manufacturing consent for government and the oligarchs.

The public is still largely numb to this reality, and in a wicked catch-22 for modern man, many people are still addicted to the very media that serves as the primary weapon of social control against them.

The tide is turning, however, and to help break the spell we bring you this comprehensive list of 11 tactics used against the public by the mainstream media to coerce consensus, divide, conquer, ridicule and stifle truthful or meaningful conversation about the state of our world.

In a letter to President Obama, 38 journalism groups criticized his administration for severely limiting access to federal agencies and a general politically-motivated suppression of information despite the president's pledge of historic transparency.

Led by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the groups said that efforts by government officials to curb free-flow of news and information to the public has reached a peak during the Obama administration following a similarly stifling culture during prior president George W. Bush's tenure in the White House.

"Over the past two decades, public agencies have increasingly prohibited staff from communicating with journalists unless they go through public affairs offices or through political appointees," wrote SPJ president David Cuillier. "This trend has been especially pronounced in the federal government. We consider these restrictions a form of censorship -- an attempt to control what the public is allowed to see and hear."

Cuillier added that while agency personnel are kept mostly off limits to journalists, they are "free [to] speak to others -- lobbyists, special-interest representatives, people with money -- without these controls and without public oversight."

While much of the public was being distracted by news reports of the scoreline in the Germany-Brazil World Cup game, another, admittedly less important, high-scoring 'game' was playing out in Israel/Palestine. While Brazil lost 7 to 1 to Germany, so far, Palestinians losses to Israel are running at 100-0, with no end to the carnage in sight.

A week ago I expressed my suspicions about the timing of the kidnapping and murder of the three Israelis teens. Since then, more details have come to light that confirm that the kidnapping was most likely a carefully orchestrated Israeli government propaganda campaign designed to destroy the Fatah/Hamas unity government, demomize the Palestinians as 'terrorists', and, as always, give the psychopaths in Tel Aviv another opportunity to blow Palestinian women and children to pieces.

As clinical studies on the psychopathic mind make clear, psychopaths periodically experience a compelling drive to give vent to their destructive instincts. In the case of psychopaths in positions of power, this usually means some kind of 'war' where innocent civilians (aka 'non-combatants') are targeted for the most brutal suffering. In the specific case of the Israeli psychopathic 'elite', the psychological profile goes something like this:

Netanyahu and his ilk have a deep, almost unconscious desire to obliterate the Palestinians, to 'erase them from the pages of history', because the Palestinians stand in the way of them achieving their goal of a idealized Jewish state where they reign supreme. The Israeli/Zionist ideologues are frequently and privately enraged at the Palestinians because the Palestinians force the Zionists to struggle to find a way to achieve their racist goals without tarnishing their own self-image as 'seeking peace' 'defending the Jewish people' being 'the only Democracy in the Middle East' etc. To the psychopaths in Israel therefore, all Palestinians are 'evil', but there's a problem: the Palestinians are not evil and their cause is just by normal human standards.
If it was up to them, the psychopaths in Israel would just kill all the Palestinians and be done with it. But they can't because they are constrained by human rights, innocence, respect and other 'silly' ideals adhered to by normal people, and to which the psychopaths must also pay lip service if they are to maintain their mask of humanity on the world stage.

To get what they want therefore, the Israeli psychopaths must solve the problem of the Palestinians not conforming (in reality) to the evil image the Israelis have of them, that would allow the Israelis to freely express their destructive urges and achieve their idealized vision of a Jewish state. The solution that psychopathic types everywhere invariably come up with is to 'create their own reality' where they literally manufacture a 'reality' to fit the demonized image they have of the 'enemy' that stands in their way. At that point, they have the 'just cause' to attack the 'enemy' whose mere existence has been 'unfairly' thwarting their attempts to get what they want i.e. achieve their psychopathic agenda.

With that in mind, let's look at the details of events over the past month in Israel/Palestine.

Today a man who has been involved in the financial markets for 50 years told KWN that unprecedented lies are being told to the public. Embry also discussed why governments are lying and what to expect going forward. Below is what John Embry had to say in this timely interview

Embry: "I'm focused on the propaganda that is being laid on the public these days. There was no better example of this type of propaganda than a report I read over the weekend from the Associated Press headlined 'What is making the U.S. economy a world beater? 5 factors.'....

"They cited the increase in jobs (288,000). But anyone who takes the time to examine those jobs would say that statistic is preposterous -- 523,000 full-time jobs were lost and part-time jobs surged by 840,000.

My daughter has a part-time job and she would love a full-time job but she can't get one. Employers don't want to give full-time jobs because they can pay next to nothing for part-time jobs and the employees don't get benefits. So the idea that a job is a job is absolutely bogus.