Amazon.com Inc has installed more than 15,000 robots across 10 U.S. warehouses, a move that promises to cut operating costs by one-fifth and get packages out the door more quickly in the run-up to Christmas.

The orange 320-pound (145 kg) robots, which scoot around the floor on wheels, show how Amazon has adopted technology developed by Kiva Systems, a robotics company it bought for $775 million in 2012. Amazon showcased to media on Sunday ahead of Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year.

The robots are designed to help the leading U.S. online retailer speed the time it takes to deliver items to customers and better compete with brick-and-mortar stores, where the bulk of Americans still do their shopping.

The Canadian government said on Sunday it was investigating reports that a Canadian-Israeli woman who joined Kurdish militias fighting in northern Syria has been captured by Islamic State (Isis) fighters.

According to a blog linked to Isis, several female fighters who fought alongside the Kurds have been taken prisoner, including Gill Rosenberg, a Canadian-born resident of Tel Aviv. Israel Radio reported Kurdish sources denying the claims, saying Rosenberg was not in the area when it was attacked.

A Canadian government spokesman said in a statement his country was "pursuing all appropriate channels" as it sought further information and was in touch with local authorities.

Asked by an Israeli television station about the reports, the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Ya'alon, said: "I cannot confirm that and I hope that it isn't true." The Shin Bet, Israel's general security service, told the Jerusalem Post: "There are no further details at this stage".

Rosenberg, 31, joined Kurdish troops fighting Isis earlier this month. A former pilot who served in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), she reportedly contacted Kurdish fighters over the internet before travelling through Iraq to train at one of their camps on the Syrian border.

When President Obama nominated Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon in 2012, the decorated Vietnam War veteran became the first enlisted man to serve as the Secretary of Defence.

Unlike his predecessors, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Donald Rumsfeld, Hagel, as an infantry squad leader, has seen firsthand the carnage of combat. And, like all who are confronted with the reality of war, he hated it.

"Every Vietnam veteran understands that," Hagel said during a 2012 interview. "Any veteran who has ever served in a war understands that, and I think we should never forget the consequences of war."

To understand Hagel is to understand why he opposed the 2007 surge. He called the Iraq war, "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam". It was his opposition to the Iraq surge that led some Senate Republicans, particularly John McCain (R-AZ), to vehemently oppose his nomination.

The series of "colour" revolutions that have occurred in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since 2010 have not happened by chance, especially since these were not a spontaneous protest by those "dreaming of democracy" but a result of the implementation of specific projects by certain Western powers to restructure the world order.

These processes of regime change occurred under the pressure of massive street protests and with the support of non-governmental organizations financed from abroad. The purpose of the colour revolutions was a coup using mainly non-violent methods of political struggle, in the interests of, and with the dominant and direct participation in planning, organization and financing by, Western nations and, above all, the United States.

Or rather, the aim was not simply an overthrow of the existing legal governments but a personified replacement of the countries' leaders, so that the "heat wave" of popular anger against the authorities would bring new faces which are in no way better than the previous ones but merely more satisfactory to the puppeteers in Washington.

The preparatory stage for unwinding the colour revolutions in the MENA region was certainly the military invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In this way the strategists in Washington, in order to solve the White House's problem of achieving full submission of the Middle East to the United States, chose Iraq as the primary objective.

• Ukraine is an artificial state created by Stalin out of Russian and Polish lands
• A good solution would be to return those lands to Russia and Poland, and return western Poland (East Prussia) to Germany
• This would be just, and defuse the current, hysterical rush to war

The spin in the US has been relentless; Russia is expanding towards a 21st century empire.

Here, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explains in detail how this is undiluted rubbish.

What has actually happened is that Moscow deftly called the Brzezinski-inspired bluff in Ukraine - with all its overtones.

No wonder the Empire of Chaos is furious.

And yet there is a solution to defuse the current, hysterical rush to war logic.

Here I have examined in some detail how Washington is playing Russian roulette. Now it's time to advance a modest proposal - as it has been discussed by a few concerned analysts from the US, Europe and Asia.

The so-called "prosecutor" in the Ferguson shooting Grand Jury deliberately fooled the jurors into believing that Wilson could legally shoot Brown as he ran away.

She did so by using a Missouri law that was ruled unconstitutional by the US supreme court in 1985. She further tried to confuse the jurors by not telling them clearly that US supreme court law overruled Missouri state law.

Ask yourself, why would she go to such lengths? Obviously, because the facts of the case show that Wilson shot the unarmed Brown dead as he was running away from Wilson.

Social justice in psychopath-ruled USA

Having lived in the former USSR before immigrating to the US, Dmitry Orlov has an invaluable perspective on both the US and Russian perspectives, as well as Ukraine.

With the western propaganda flying thick and heavy, it's more important than ever to cut through the chaff and learn what we can about the most important geopolitical realignment (and renewed tensions) in recent memory.

Well, look, Russia is a place that's extremely dynamic as changing response to challenging environment, to changed environment, very popular throughout the world, at peace with most of the world, even with nations that are at war with each other, both sides will still talk to Russia and have friendly relations. Russia has a splendid relationship with both Israel and Iran for instance.

The United States is a nation that can't get anything together, can't get anything on, not education, not healthcare, nothing. It's basically sinking into a cesspool of its own making it can't respond at all. And now, it is basically being shown up to be quite incompetent in playing this international game. Now, what happens if you can't play a game by the rules is you're penalized and you forfeit the game. So, either the US leadership will learn how to play by the rules or they forfeit. I see those are as the only two real outcomes.

There's a difference to how the Russians approach the world and how the Americans approach the world. So, for instance, Americans like to threaten. If you don't do this, then we will do X, Y and Z. That's a typical American behavior.

That's not something that the Russians would ever do because they don't threaten, they just act because if you threaten, then you take away the element of surprise which is very important. The other thing is Americans refuse to talk to their enemies, they won't negotiate with terrorists, they won't do X, Y and Z and can't be reasoned with at all. You can just listen to them and do what they say or they'll bomb you whereas the Russians always talk to their enemies. Russia keeps the channels of communication open.

And the other thing is that all of this endless trash talking is very detrimental to the business of democracy and there's been a constant stream of basically garbage emanating from the west, some of it social media, some of it through the old fashioned press. But, just basically all kinds of lies and disinformation and slander, which makes the tedious business of diplomacy establishing various links at various levels very difficult, if not impossible. So there's just this incredible level of disgust with their, as they say, partners in the west in Moscow and the result is they're not really eager to talk anymore. They're not very interested in communicating. They're far more interested in acting. So, what we'll probably see is a constant stream of surprises coming from Russia that will be completely unannounced and not predicted by anyone.

There are 7.2 billion people on this planet but the United States fears only one man - Vladimir Putin. That's because on virtually every front of the new Cold War, the Russian president is walloping the collective challenge of the West. Fear can make you do strange things - for the second year running, Forbes magazine has named Putin as the world's most powerful person.

It is said about the Russians that they take a long time to saddle their horses, but they ride awfully fast. After patiently nursing the collapsed Russian economy back to health from 1999 to 2007, Putin started pushing back against the western encirclement of his country. In Syria, Crimea and Ukraine, the West has faced humiliating setbacks and melted away at his approach. In the high-stakes game of energy, it will be Russian - not western - pipelines that will dominate the Eurasian landmass.

But instead of scorekeeping, a more instructive exercise would be to try and understand how Putin has managed to keep Russia ahead in the game.

More than any other leader, the Russian president by virtue of his KGB experience understands how the US operates. The American modus operandi - in sync with the British - is to organise coups, rebellions and counter-revolutions in countries where nationalist leaders come to power. Iran, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama and Ukraine are the classic examples.

John Perkins writes in Confessions of an Economic Hitman (2004) how he and other 'hitmen' like him were sent to developing countries as consultants to bribe or coerce diplomats, economists, administrators and politicians to do the bidding of the US. Often they succeeded, but if they failed then the CIA would send in the 'jackals' - professionally trained assassins who would engineer the deaths of those who stood in the way of complete American domination.

(Chilean prime minister Salvador Allende's assassination - the result of a request by PepsiCo chairman Donald Kendall to the company's former lawyer president Richard Nixon - is a classic example of a CIA jackal job.)

Whether as a result of an unprecedented scare campaign by the Swiss National Bank (most recently reinforced by Citigroup), or due to confidence that Swiss gold is as safe abroad as it is at home, or simply due to good old-fashioned "hanging chads", today's most awaited event has come and gone and the result - according to early projections by Swiss television SRF -is that the Swiss population overwhelmingly rejected a referendum to force the Swiss National Bank to hold some 20% of its reserves in gold in a landslide vote, with about 78% voting against what AP politely termed "protecting the country's wealth by investing in gold."

As Bloomberg reports, the proposal stipulating the Swiss National Bank hold at least 20 percent of its 520-billion-franc ($540 billion) balance sheet in gold was voted down by 78 percent to 22 percent, according to projections by Swiss television SRF as of 1:00 p.m. local time. The initiative "Save Our Swiss Gold" also would have prohibited the SNB from ever selling any of its bullion and required the 30 percent currently stored in Canada and the U.K. to be repatriated.

The abrupt resignation of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel - along with the failure to reach a final agreement on Iran's nuclear program on the same day - does not augur well for the last quarter of Barack Obama's presidency, reflecting his continuing tendency to let the neocons have their way.

Not that Hagel had distinguished himself as a sterling leader of the Pentagon - nor has all hope disappeared that a sensible resolution of the impasse with Iran might be achieved before the next "deadline" in June - but Obama still does not appear to have escaped the spell of the neocons who continue to dominate American geopolitical thought despite the bloody disasters that they helped cause in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Six years into his presidency, Obama still doesn't seem to understand that just because some people have impressive credentials doesn't mean they know what they're doing. Indeed, in a profoundly corrupted system - like the one that now controls Official Washington - rewards are handed out to people who serve the corrupt interests or at least don't get in the way.

In a time of corruption, the countervailing forces of wisdom and courage will never be found among the credentialed, but rather among the outcasts of the establishment, those who were forced to the margins because they objected to the venality, because they stood up against misguided "group think."

But Obama has been unwilling - or possibly unable - to come to grips with this reality. Despite his personal intelligence and rhetorical skills, Obama never has been willing to challenge people cloaked in credentials - those who went to the best schools, worked at big-name firms, won prestigious awards or held fellowships at famous think tanks.

The tragedy of Obama is that I'm told that he understands the stupidity of the modern U.S. establishment and does sometimes consult with "realists" who offer practical advice for how he can resolve some of the most nettlesome problems facing the United States around the world. But he does so virtually in secret, with what politicians like to call "deniability."