Though Russia has a right to demand an early repayment of its $3 billion loan to Kiev if its total debt exceeds 60 percent of GDP, Moscow has already decided against it, as it wants Ukraine to get on its feet, Vladimir Putin told German ARD channel.

Vladimir Putin answered questions from ARD's Hubert Seipel.

Hubert Seipel: After the Crimea joined Russia, the West expelled Russia from the Group of Eight, this exclusive club of industrial states. At the same time the USA and Great Britain imposed sanctions against Russia. Now you are heading to a G20 summit of the most important industrial states on the planet. The focus there will be on economic growth and employment. Russian Finance Minister said the following about your country: "There is no more growth and unemployment is set to increase. The sanctions are starting to have an effect: both the ruble and the oil price have set anti‑records." This is the exact opposite of what you are going to speak about in Brisbane. The forecast of attaining 2 percent growth in Russia is unfeasible. Other countries are in the same situation. This crisis has a counter‑productive character, including for the upcoming summit, wouldn't you say?

Vladimir Putin: You mean the Ukrainian crisis?

Hubert Seipel: Yes.

Vladimir Putin: Of course, who could benefit from it? You wanted to know how the situation is evolving and what our expectations are. Of course we expect the situation to change for the better. Of course we expect the Ukrainian crisis to end. Of course we want to have normal relations with our partners, including in the United States and Europe. Of course, the situation with the so-called sanctions is damaging for the global economy (it is damaging for us and it is damaging for global economy as well) and it is damaging for the Russian EU relations most of all. In this case it contradicts international law, which governs economic relations, the WTO principles and the agreements we will try to reach during the G20summit. It comes into direct collision.

By the way, according to the European Commission data, the losses from Russia's counter-measures aimed at protecting our economy are estimated as 5 - 6 billion euro. Can we estimate the losses that these sanctions have caused Russia? It is rather difficult. To some extent, these are virtual losses. Although we have really sustained losses, it is true. However, there are some advantages as well: the restrictions imposed on some Russian companies on purchasing certain goods from Western countries, from Europe and the United States, have induced us to produce these goods ourselves. The comfortable life, when all we had to do was produce more oil and gas, and to buy everything else, is a thing of the past. Now we must think about producing goods ourselves, not just oil and gas. We have solid science and technology resources, which makes us fully confident of our ability to address any technology issues independently, including in the defence sphere.

With regard to growth, we should note that this year growth was modest but it was present nevertheless at about 0.5 - 0.6 percent. Next year we are planning to achieve 1.2 percent growth, the year after that 2.3 percent and 3 percent in three years. Generally, these are not the figures we would like to have but nevertheless it is growth and we are confident that we will achieve these figures.

Israel, not Russia, was behind the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July, an American political commentator says.


In a phone interview with Press TV on Sunday, Professor James Henry Fetzer said, "While the United States is claiming that the newly released photographs by Russia -- claiming that the Ukrainian military jets targeted the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 -- are preposterous, [but] that does not mean they are not authentic, or that the plane having been shot down by Ukrainian jets is not true."

On Friday, Russian state media released satellite images purportedly showing a Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter jet firing a missile at the MH17.

This is bizarre. The recent two summits (APEC and G20) have, I would argue, ended up as a disaster for the US and its allies (see here, here and here) while Russia, China and the rest of the BRICS are clearly in control of the situation, yet there are still those who believe the western corporate media which wants to portray Putin are Russia as "weak".

I suppose in our age of virtual reality perceptions are everything, and in this case such perceptions are clearly molded by exposure to the western corporate media whose brainwashing skills are nothing short of amazing. But let's look at the facts.

The single biggest development which came out of these two summits is that Xi Jinping has clearly and, for the first time, openly shown that he fully support Putin and Russia.

Dumb and Dumber To, the sequel after 20 years, was released recently. Unfortunately for Jim and Jeff and the Farrelly brothers, unintended humor will always be funnier than the scripted kind, no matter how hard Hollywood tries. Case in point: the Dumber slapstick was easily upstaged over the past few days by the G20 summit in Brisbane.

Not only did the pedantic Anglo-Saxon power hungry freak show of Harper, Cameron and Abbott (nobody even noticed Obama) give Vladimir V. Putin a good laugh with their empty chest thumping, entirely spin doctor scripted and entirely aimed at their domestic media and audiences, these so-called leaders also came up with no less than 800(!) measures they claim will boost global economic growth by 2.1%, or $2 trillion. Over 5 years, or some useless and opaque number like that (2018?).

It would seem to be painfully obvious that what the world needs really urgently badly today is not so much economic growth, but growth in the dendrites, synapses and neurons in the heads of both our leaders and of those who put them where they are, ourselves. No use holding your breath. As things are, none of us are any smarter than either Dumb or Dumber.

The remarks by Barack Obama at the University of Queensland on Saturday, delivered while he was in Australia for the G20 Leaders Summit, was a bellicose restatement that the US will use every means, including war, to prevent any challenge by China to American dominance over the Asia-Pacific.

Much of the speech was devoted to reviewing the military deployments and diplomatic intrigues against China that Washington has carried out since Obama announced the "pivot to Asia" before the Australian parliament in 2011. He boasted of how the US has strengthened its ties with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, opened new bases in Australia and Singapore, encouraged India to play a greater regional military role and pursued closer relations with Vietnam, Malaysia and Burma.

China, by contrast, was discussed from the standpoint of US suspicions over "what kind of role it will play" in the region. Obama's platitudes that the US welcomed China's economic growth were swiftly followed by assertions that Beijing must "adhere to the same rules as other nations" - rules dictated by Washington - if conflict was to be avoided.

A Conservative MP murdered a young boy during a depraved sex party in the 1980s, an alleged victim of the Westminster paedophile scandal has claimed.

The 12-year-old boy, who was being abused by a group of men, was strangled by the politician at a luxury townhouse in front of other victims, it has been alleged.

On another occasion, the victim claims a young boy, who was around ten-years-old, was deliberately run down and killed by a car being driven by one of his abusers.

The alleged murders are among three that are now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police as part of a major probe into claims that a powerful paedophile ring with links to Westminster was operating in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.

Scotland Yard, which set up Operation Fairbank two years ago to look at the abuse claims, announced on Friday it had launched a fresh strand of the inquiry, entitled Operation Midland, to probe the alleged murders.

A war is being fought for control over Western Kurdistan and the northern areas of Syria, including three de facto Kurdish enclaves there. The fighting in Western Kurdistan is a means to an end and not a goal in itself. The objectives of gaining control over Syrian Kurdistan and northern Syria are critical to gaining control over the rest of the Syrian Arab Republic and entail US-supported regime change in Damascus.

Western Kurdistan is alternatively called Rojava in Kurmanji, the dialect of the Kurdish language that is used locally there and spoken by the majority of the Kurds living in Turkey. The word Rojava comes from the Kurdish root word roj, which means both sun and day, and literally means «sunset» («the sun's end») or the «end of the day» («the day's end») in Kurmanji and not the word «west». The confusion over its meaning arises for two main reasons. The first is that in the Sorani or Central dialect of the Kurdish language the word roj is only used to refer to the day. The second is that Rojava connotes or suggests the direction of the west, where the sun is seen to set when the day ends.

The Siege on Ayn Al-Arab or Kobani

Despite the fact that neither the Syrian military nor the Syrian government controls most of Syrian Kurdistan and that a significant amount of the locals there have declared themselves neutral, the forces of the Free Syrian Army, Al-Nusra, and the ISIL (DAISH) have launched a multiparty war on Rojava's mosaic of inhabitants. It has only been in late-2014 that this war on Western Kurdistan has gained international attention as the Syrian Kurds in Aleppo Governorate's northeastern district (mintaqah) of Ayn Al-Arab (Ain Al-Arab) became surrounded by the ISIL in late-September and early-October. As this happened, the behaviour of the US and its allies, specifically the neo-Ottomanist Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, exposed their true objectives in Rojava and Syria. By the time that the Syrian Kurds in northeastern Aleppo Governorate were being encircled by the ISIL, it was clear that Washington and its counterfeit anti-ISIL coalition were actually using the ISIL outbreak to redraw the strategic and ethno-confessional maps of Syria and Iraq. Many of the Syrian Kurds think that the goal is to force them eastward into Iraqi Kurdistan and to surrender to Turkish domination.
Fears of another exodus in Syria - similar to the one that was felt when Turkey assisted Jubhat Al-Nusra's violent takeover of the mostly ethnic Armenian town of Kasab (Kessab) in Latakia Governorate in March 2014 - began to materialize. Nearly 200,000 Syrians - Kurds, Turkoman, Assyrians, Armenians, and Arabs - fled across the Syrian-Turkish border. By October 9, one-third of Ayn Al-Arab had fallen to the pseudo-caliphate.

These headlines are silly:

• India Times - Barack Obama says Russia will remain isolated if it continues to destabilise Ukraine
• Yahoo - Cameron warns Russia of isolation, further sanctions over Ukraine
• LA Times - Putin faces isolation at G-20 conference
• NY Times - Putin Gets a Cool Reception From G-20
• Vice - World Leaders Snub Putin at G20, Exile Him to 'Social Siberia'
• Reuters - G20 commits to higher growth, fight climate change; Russia isolated over Ukraine
• Guardian - Isolated Putin leaves G20 summit

Even more silly then those headlines was the German prime news Tagesschau which used a picture of Putin seemingly sitting alone at a lunch table to prove his "isolation". But news service pictures show that he is sitting with the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff waiting for the other lunch guests to sit down next to them. These were simply not visible in the frame Tagesschau selectively used.

And do these headline writers, TV correspondents and politicians know what the 20 in G-20 means? The people who publicly miffed Putin in Brisbane were Obama, Cameron, Harper, Abbott and Abe. I count five out of twenty.

I want to take just a few minutes of your time because this is really important. Please read this article, watch the videos and check out the documentaries linked below. If you've got any friends in the Army or know anyone considering joining up please share it with them.

Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy. - Henry Kissinger, former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.

War is part of human history, we have fought each other for millennia. In most cases wars have been waged to take territories and resources. All major nations have won their power through blood and iron. Not a lot has changed today. Big players still try to dominate the world by playing out a grand chess game. They conspire to deceive and manipulate the public through propaganda campaigns and false flag operations, they often invent non-existent threats to justify their actions. Soldiers are led to believe that they are fighting for a just cause to protect their countries, but in many cases this is a travesty of the truth.

Kiev has suspended the protection of human rights and ordered the withdrawal of its institutions from areas controlled by local militia in the nation's east. Rebels have branded the decree, which hits the population on winter's eve, an 'act of genocide.'

The move was prepared by the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council last week and enacted by a presidential decree signed on Friday. It has yet to be ratified by the newly-elected parliament, but the decree explicitly says that this procedure must be expedited - so there is little doubt that the new governing coalition will adopt it next week.