The White House chief of staff says President Barack Obama is "madder than hell" about reports of treatment delays at veterans' hospitals across the country.

Top aide Denis McDonough tells CBS' Face the Nation that Obama is demanding that Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki (shin-SEHK'-ee) and others in the administration "continue to fix these things until they're functioning the way that our veterans believe they should."

"The world today has 6.9 billion people and that's headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent." ~ Bill Gates (video here)

Bill Gates believes the density of the population in poor areas is too big, and with his depopulation plans he can 'solve' that problem. Consider his huge buyout of Monsanto stock - he owns millions of shares of Monsanto and Cargill stock, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation keep scooping it up. He owns more than $23 million worth, or 500,000 Monsanto shares.

Seattle-based Agra-Watch, part of the Community Alliance for Global Justice, has said:

"Monsanto has a history of blatant disregard for the interests and well being of small farmers around the world... [This] casts serious doubt on the foundation's heavy funding of agricultural development in Africa."

It also casts serious doubt on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its true interests in supporting the 'poor' populations they so proudly claim they are trying to 'help.

'Gates also funds programs that blast men's reproductive organs with radiation so that they can no longer produce progeny, and covert nanotechnology that delivers dangerous vaccines. The Gates Foundation is also teaming up with the British government in raising $4 billion to fund their birth control agenda worldwide by 2020.

Obama's new India problem: What to do with Narendra Modi? (+video)

Narendra Modi will be the next prime minister of India, but until Friday, he was banned from traveling to the US because of allegations related to a 2002 riot. It's a new complication for already-rocky US-India relations.

On Friday, President Obama did what just about everyone knew he must and invited Narendra Modi, India's new prime-minister-in-waiting, to the United States.

It was anything but a routine invitation.

Mr. Modi remains the only person ever to be banned from traveling to the United States under the International Religious Freedom Act. Until Friday, the Obama administration had not officially clarified whether the future leader of the world's largest democracy would even be allowed to come to Washington.

In truth, there was little suspense. India is important to US Asia policy, and recent relations have been so rocky that it would have been unthinkable for Mr. Obama to respond to the success of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with anything other than overt enthusiasm.

But the fact that the decision came only now - only after it was abundantly clear that the BJP had won India's recent elections in a landslide of historic proportions - hints at a reluctance.

Unfairly or not, Modi is in many ways the face of the 2002 Gujarat riots, which saw some of the worst religious violence in India's recent history. For a American president who has taken pains to reach out to the Muslim world - not to mention a president who is himself a minority - that represents an unneeded complication in America's already-strained friendship with India.

Psssst, Wanna Buy My Corporation?

Where's Charles Dickens when we need him? The novelist, who laid bare the shame of gross income inequality in 19th century England, came up with some perfect names for his more despicable characters, including Scrooge, Mr. Tulkinghorn, and Miss Havisham.

So I'm wondering what moniker Dickens would've given to Robert Marcus.

Who? He's the CEO of Time Warner Cable who already won gold in the 2014 Greed Olympics for grabbing the most cash with the least effort in the shortest time.

Marcus became chief of the cable company on New Year's Day. He immediately reached out to his corporation's biggest rival, Comcast, offering to sell Time Warner Cable to the giant. Only six weeks later, the deal was done.

Why would a CEO rush to eliminate both his corporation and his own job? Perhaps because of a lucrative little provision in the contract he signed to become Time Warner's honcho. It's a CCC - a "change of control clause."

How the fracking companies benefit from Western-lead destabalisation of Ukraine and other conflicts of interest

Citing a 'new study', The BBC, Independent and a multitude of copy & paste MSM outlets, have alarmingly reported that the UK is set to run out of its oil, coal, and gas supplies in a little over five years time.

The reality below the ground however is that the UK is not actually going to run out of energy supplies any time soon. Facts can't be allowed to get in the way of profits, and the study was (apparently deliberately) distorted for use in a PR campaign on behalf of the widely criticized Fracking Industry. The story also reveals a tangled web of connections between academia, government officials, energy company lobbyists accentuated by a Fracking company director who actually holds a ministerial position for the UK Government. Why am I not surprised?

Economist John Williams has a dire prediction for the U.S. dollar. Williams says, "I don't see what will save it at this point. . . . Now we are to the point that the dollar has been ignored for years. The federal deficit has been ignored for years. . . . That's what we are on the brink of disaster with, and that is what has to be addressed now, and that's not happening." Williams also contends, "The way I see it, the dollar could go to zero in terms of its purchasing power. You don't want to have your assets in U.S. dollars." How are we going to get there? Look no further that the dismal first quarter gross domestic product (GDP) numbers that officially only eked out .1% growth. This is one of the reasons why Williams thinks a "renewed broad economic downturn continues to unfold." Williams goes on to say, "We're turning down a new. The first quarter should be revised to negative territory, and I believe the second quarter will be reported negative as well. That will happen by July 30 when you have the annual revisions to the GDP. In reality, the economy is much weaker than that . . . . Generally, when you adjust for inflation and you use too low of a rate for inflation, that overstates the economic growth."

Before Pfizer paid at least $299 million to settle claims that its anti-smoking drug Chantix caused harm, the pharmaceutical giant played hardball with Army Pfc. George D.B. MacDonald.

Charged with murdering fellow soldier and Fresno, Calif., native Rick Bulmer in May 2008, MacDonald claimed his mind snapped after using the medication to stop smoking. Chantix, MacDonald wrote, caused him to "go crazy for a while" before the assault in their Fort Benning, Ga., barracks.

During his court-martial, Pfizer resisted turning over certain documents to the defense team, including clinical trial studies that were conducted on Chantix.

"I mean, it is the United States and Pfizer versus Pfc. MacDonald here," MacDonald's attorney, Lt. Col. Jan Aldykiewicz, fumed at a pretrial hearing June 1, 2009, a transcript shows.

The trial judge disagreed and refused to compel the company, which wasn't a party to the case, to comply with a subpoena for the material. The military jury subsequently convicted MacDonald of murdering Bulmer, a 23-year-old private, and sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole.

Portugal exited its international bailout program on Saturday, regaining its economic sovereignty, which it lost after the European debt crisis. However, the country's GDP is four percent lower than in 2010, a year before it asked for financial help.

The country will become the second eurozone country to leave the bailout after Ireland. Portugal underwent three years of painful austerity, in order to receive a 78-billion euro loan (106 billion US dollars), to help a nation that was on the verge of bankruptcy.

However, not everything has gone smoothly for Portugal, with the end of the bailout coming at a time when data has shown the country's economy contracted by 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2014. Overall, the country's GDP is four percent lower than in 2010, a year before they asked the International Monetary Fund for financial help.

This week on SOTT Talk Radio we spoke with Dmitry Orlov, a Russian-American engineer and a writer on the subject of societal collapse.

Born in Saint Petersburg, Orlov moved to the U.S. at the age of 12. Visiting his homeland between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, he was an eyewitness to the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

Orlov has written extensively on the stages leading up to collapse, and how different groups of people adapt to 'the new normal'. Orlov argues that the U.S. is heading the same way, and that the U.S.S.R. had it easy compared to what's in store for the Atlantic Empire.

Orlov is the author of two books Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, and The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit, and regularly publishes essays at his Club Orlov blog.

Running Time: 01:38:00

Download: MP3

Media views that deviate from the mainstream are more often than not condemned and it seems RT has not been able to escape this trend. A Jewish rights group has branded RT "anti-Semite" over a satirical sketch lampooning Israel's policy on Palestine.

US President Barack Obama's former speechwriter Jon Lovett coined the phrase "the culture of shut up" where views that do not conform are silenced by often misplaced moral outrage. To name but a few recent cases, former CEO of Mozilla Brendan Eich was silenced and forced to resign after it hit headlines he had supported California's Proposition 8 which sought to ban same sex marriages. While Somali activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali fell afoul of the mainstream for her criticism of Islam, which sparked outrage among religious groups.


RT has fallen into the same trap and been branded as anti-Semite by a Jewish rights organization. The Wiesenthal Center has demanded a public apology over a satirical show broadcast on RT they say expressed "raw Jew hatred."