If you had any doubt about the boldfaced sham that "democracy" is, that doubt should be completely alleviated now. The people in Hawaii County voted that they did not want GMOs.

...in addition to banning any new GMO crops. The bill forbids any open-air testing or production of genetically modified crops. It also prohibits farmers from growing any new GMO crops but grandfathers in those that are already being grown, such as the Rainbow papaya.

The court overruled that vote in favor of the biggest pro-GMO agricultural corporation of all - state and federal biotech interests.

George 'regime change' Soros recently visited Kyrgyzstan, prompting fears of a possible coup d'état in the country.

"We are against arrival of the billionaire George Soros to our country," the representative of NGO Strong Kyrgyzstan Muratbek uluu Bekbolot defined the aim of the protest, passing near the building of the US Embassy in the Kyrgyz Republic, to 24.kg news agency.

According to him, after his first visit to our country there was a coup in 2005. "Now Soros again appeared, and we suspect that he is planning another revolution in our country. We are for peace in Kyrgyzstan and don't want war. Our country will not survive another coup," he added.

A small group of people gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy in the Kyrgyz Republic, demanding that Soros leave the country immediately. Who can blame them?

"Soros Criminal Conviction Exposes 'Human Rights' Scam"

Soros has built a global empire of networked nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) allegedly promoting "human rights," "freedom," "democracy," and "transparency." His Open Society Institute funds amongst many others, Amnesty International (page 10), Global Voices, and Human Rights Watch. In reality these NGOs constitute a modern day network of imperial administrators, undermining national governments around the world and replacing them with a homogeneous "civil society" that interlocks with "international institutions" run from and on behalf of Wall Street and London. And contrary to popular belief, Soros has built this empire, not against "conservative" ambitions, but with their full cooperation.

And it seems that Soros isn't the only problem, Kyrgyz member of parliament Irina Karamushkina recently expressed concerns about activities of American NGO 'TechCamp' in the country.

MP Irina Karamushkina said at today's plenary session of the Parliament of Kyrgyzstan the NGO "TechCamp" is holding meetings with youth in Bishkek, which held similar meetings prior to the Maidan events in Ukraine.

"This NGO has been holding meetings with our youth for 2 weeks already. Do our special services have information about what kind of meetings this NGO is holding? This NGO held similar meetings with youth prior to the events on Maidan in Ukraine. Aren't we wasting time, while someone is shaping views of your youth?" the lawmaker interrogated.

The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.

The report subjected a major country to a wide-ranging critique, indicting it for a long list of human rights violations including:

• Refusal to prosecute officials who engage in or sanction torture of prisoners
• Detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial or other judicial proceeding, or any hope of release
• Kidnapping individuals overseas and torturing them in secret prisons
• Approving a manual for interrogation of prisoners that includes methods classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions
• Imprisoning immigrants under degrading conditions and refusing to acknowledge their claims as refugees fleeing persecution
• Imposing the death penalty on hundreds of prisoners, many of them from oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, many of them demonstrably innocent or unfairly tried
• Widespread use of solitary confinement, considered a form of torture, at all levels of the prison system
• Severe abuse of juveniles, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups both in police custody and in prisons
• Maintaining a regime of police violence, particularly against young men from racial and ethnic minorities, and refusing to restrain or punish police who kill, wound or torture

It will not come as any surprise to readers of the WSWS that the country named is not China, or Russia, or Iran, or some other target of the American ruling class, but the US itself. The government that claims the right to bully, blockade, and attack any country in the world in the name of "human rights" and "democracy" is guilty of the most heinous crimes.

The language of the report is both cautious and bureaucratic, and there are strained efforts to congratulate the Obama administration on alleged improvements, compared to the Bush administration, on such practices as extraordinary rendition and waterboarding. But the overall impact of this indictment is damning.

The looters in Ferguson are reportedly total strangers to the community

The looting and destruction of property that has taken place in Ferguson, Missouri has been the primary justification for the excessive police and military action in the community this week. However, it seems that there is a good possibility that the looters have come from out of town, and are not affiliated in any way with the protesters. It is also highly possible, if not probable, that agent provocateurs have been sent in to create trouble, so the police then have an excuse to use as much force as they want against the protesters.

In most cases, political protestors are nonviolent and do everything they possibly can to avoid clashes with the police. Demonstrators are well aware that they are out-matched in terms of firepower and are only getting out in the streets in large numbers to show how much support is behind their message.

Almost every single time there is a public protest, the authorities are unsympathetic and use heavy force to intimidate anyone who may want to resist in the future. However, they don't attack the protesters with guns blazing right away, because they know that it will further expose their oppressive nature and add credibility to the revolutionary movement. So agents provocateurs are used to instigate physical altercations between activists and authorities.

For the ninth time, Russia is sending in another humanitarian aid convoy to E. Ukraine. As reported by TASS:

Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations has formed up in the Rostov region a convoy of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid for Ukraine's Donbass, the ministry's representative Oleg Voronov told TASS on Saturday.

"The convoy is ready to go. It unites over 100 trucks, which will deliver to Donbass over 1,200 tonnes of humanitarian aid," he said.

Food products and construction materials make most of the cargo, he added.

The ministry formed the cargo according to requests from authorities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The media could see the cargo in the trucks on Saturday. Reporters were free to pick a truck to see it carries only the declared cargo.

Russia has been consistently sending aid and not only to Ukraine, but to Palestine as well. All Poroshenko can say is "Donbass children can sit in cellars." Ugh, what a repulsive creature.

Gold is still in the news, as several European states have called for the repatriation of their gold bullion reserves held in the United States (and other foreign banks). As Aeneas Georg wrote in his recent SOTT Exclusive, Gold, gold, gold! Dutch gold boosted, Ukrainian gold looted, Russia buying BIG, Swiss vote gold-quake, the Dutch government has successfully, and secretly, repatriated 20% of its total gold holdings from the United States. (The U.S. still holds 31%.)

This trend comes at the same time as the revelation that the U.S. emptied the coffers in Ukraine, airlifting their gold reserves out of the country soon after the U.S.-backed coup early this year. (And following which, Iraq bought 36 tonnes of gold from the U.S., the biggest purchase by a country in three years.) Also, countries like Russia and China are buying up gold as fast as they can. Russia, in particular, is selling off oil in exchange for gold. (See: SOTT EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Russian economist Mikhail Khazin: On gold, the imminent collapse of Western neo-liberalism, and Eurasianism) As Dimitry Kalinichenko recently put it:

The twist of Putin's game is that the mechanism for the sale of Russian energy to the West only for gold now works regardless of whether the West agrees to pay for Russian oil and gas with its artificially cheap gold, or not.
...
Thus, in exchange for Russian oil, gas and uranium, the West pays Russia with dollars, purchasing power of which is artificially inflated against oil and gold by the efforts (manipulations) of the West. However, Putin uses these dollars only to withdraw physical gold from the West in exchange at a price denominated in US dollars, artificially lowered by the same West.
...
The problem of the West is that the stocks of physical gold in possession of the West are not unlimited. Therefore, the more the West devalues oil and gold against the US dollar, the faster it loses devaluing Gold from its not infinite reserves.
...
Thus, Russia poses a real threat to the American model of petrodollar world domination.

The other countries looking to get their gold back include Germany, Switzerland and France. And this is where things get interesting.

An Egyptian court has found former president Hosni Mubarak not guilty of conspiring to kill hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising, which led to his ouster. He was further exonerated on separate corruption charges.

Addressing journalists in attendance, chief judge Mahmud Kamel al-Rashidi warned the media they should reserve judgment until they had read the massive 1,430 verdict in its entirety.

The former leader had been charged along with seven of his former police commanders for the death of 239 protesters - a fraction of the 850 people activists believe died in the unrest. Judge al-Rashidi said the charges had been politically motivated and did not deserve to be tried in his court. Mubarak's interior minister Habib el-Adly and six aides were also found not guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.

It was a Malaysian jet, carrying Malaysian passengers, flown by Malaysian pilots, yet after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014, Malaysia has been systematically blocked from participating in the investigation, leaving an overwhelmingly pro-NATO bloc in charge of the evidence, investigation and outcome as well as the manner in which the investigation will be carried out.

Despite the integral role Malaysia has played during several pivotal moments in the aftermath of the disaster, it appears that the closer to the truth the investigation should be getting, the further Malaysia itself is being pushed from both the evidence and any influence it has on the likely conclusions of the investigation. With the downed aircraft in question being Malaysian, Malaysia as a partner in the investigation would seem a given. Its exclusion from the investigation appears to be an indication that the investigation's objectivity has been compromised and that the conclusions it draws will likely be politically motivated.

Is the US planning the occupation of Syria by training an unconventional insurgent invasion force?

Think regime change in Syria is off the drawing board? Think again. The bombing of the ISIL or ISIS in Syria is part of a brinkmanship campaign leading up to a potential non-conventional invasion, parallel to the re-introduction of the US military to Iraq.

The ISIL and the other anti-government forces in Iraq and Syria are not the only ones to disregard the Iraqi-Syrian border drawn by the British and French by Sykes-Picot in 1916. The US also disregarded the border and international law when it began to illegally bomb Syria.

The bombing campaign was not enough for some in the US Congress. In a joint statement on September 23, the arch-hawks US Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham called for US troops to be sent into Syria too. Both of them praised the Pentagon's illegal airstrikes in Syria and then argued for US ground troops as well.

Although McCain and Graham went out of their way to say that this would not be an occupation of either Syria or Iraq, this is almost exactly what they were calling for when they said that the military campaign had to also be directed against the Syrian government.

Since, and even before the calls for an invasion of Syria by McCain and Graham different suggestions have circulated about an invasion of Syria.

The dilemma is that Washington does not want the Pentagon to directly invade Syria itself. It wants to pull the strings while another force does the work on the ground. Candidates for an outsourced invasion of Syria include the Turkish military or other US regional allies. There, however is also an impasse here as Washington's allies are also afraid of the consequences of an invasion of Syria.

This is where a third opinion comes into the picture: the construction of a multinational insurgent army by the US.

At its meeting today in Vienna, Austria, the 12 member countries of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) voted to keep their output target unchanged despite a 30 percent slump in the oil price since June, due primarily to the explosive growth in fracking in the U.S. as well as decreasing global demand. While Venezuela made a case for an output reduction, Saudi Arabia, the world's leading oil producer and exporter, pressured to keep it the same.

The price immediately declined in response, dropping below $72 a barrel, a price last seen in August 2010.

"There's a price decline. That does not mean that we should really rush and do something," OPEC secretary general Abdallah Salem el-Badri told the BBC. "We don't want to panic. We want to see the market, how the market behaves, because the decline of the price does not reflect a fundamental change."