"Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I'm out of there"

These are the words of the former economics editor of the BBC's Newsnight show, Paul Mason, relating to the BBC's coverage of the Scottish independence referendum. The London broadcaster's biased reporting on Scottish independence is not an isolated incident however, as the BBC has been blatantly warping, misrepresenting and omitting pertinent facts and narratives on numerous issues, from its coverage on Israel to its distortion on Ukraine.

The broadcaster has been widely criticised by many in Scotland and around the world for their "propaganda" campaign in the run up to the referendum in September, leading thousands of people to take to the streets in protest over the lack of journalistic integrity at the BBC. A major episode of this was when the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, censored Alex Salmond's lengthy response to a question regarding the rumours that the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) would move its headquarters to London if Scotland voted for independence. Despite Salmond's comprehensive response to the question which gave the BBC seven minutes of video footage to edit for their report, Robinson decided to deceive the public and falsely claim he "didn't answer" the question. This was part of a wider "propaganda" campaign of injecting fear and uncertainty into the idea of Scotland being an independent nation.


The BBC's coverage of Scottish independence is just a microcosm of how the organisation operates with regards to many issues around the world, yet many people still give BBC news unmerited credence. This is not to say that there is not some good people within the BBC, however the broadcaster has repeatedly demonstrated that it serves as a propaganda organ of the Anglo-American establishment.

Government ministers in Israel have voted to increase penalties ten-fold on people convicted of throwing stones at vehicles from two to 20 years, in a move designed to deal with a wave of violence that has hit some of Jerusalem's Arab districts.

If Israeli courts can prove that someone threw a stone with the intent of causing serious bodily harm, they may be able to impose a jail sentence of 20 years.

The law would also allow the conviction of people who hurl rocks at police cars or police officers with the aim of hindering them from carrying out their duty.

If intent to cause harm can't be proven, then the amendments still allow for a hefty 10-year sentence if the safety of a person or a vehicle is endangered. At the moment, such crimes have a maximum penalty of two years in prison.

Although the changes have been given the green light by the Israeli cabinet, they must still be approved by the Knesset and the ministerial Committee for Legislation.

The proposed legislation change stems from the recommendation of a committee headed by Cabinet Secretary Avichai Mandelblit, which was tasked with dealing with the deteriorating security situation in East Jerusalem.

Islamic State leader Caliph Ibrahim - aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - never ceases to amaze us - and most of all his powerful petrodollar-stuffed backers. The Caliph is for all practical purposes now an oil major worth of membership of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). His takfiri/mercenary goons - in theory - have for some time been extracting, refining, shipping and/or smuggling and clinching juicy deals involving vast quantities of oil, reaping profits of roughly US$2 million a day.

The Caliph's oil prices are to die (be beheaded?) for; after all, he's implementing the same low-price strategy concocted by the people he wants to dethrone in Mecca, the House of Saud. The caliphate's GDP across "Syraq" has only one way to go: up.

And oh, the irony. Top customers for The Caliph's cheap oil happen to be "Sultan" Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Earthly paradise, aka Turkey - a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally - and that King "Playstation" Abdullah II ibn al-Hussein's domain impersonating a country, aka Jordan.

Meanwhile, the awesome, immensely sophisticated military apparatus/intel agency acronym fest deployed by "free" US/NATO somehow is simply unable to register/intercept this racket.

Not surprising, when they somehow had not previously registered/intercepted The Caliph's goons taking over large swaths of "Syraq" this summer with their cross-desert version of rolling thunder - that gleaming white Toyota promo ad.

As for the Empire of Chaos "solution" to intercept The Caliph's oil profits, the only decision so far has been to bomb oil pipelines that belong to the Syrian Arab Republic, that is, ultimately, the Syrian people.

Never underestimate the capacity of US President Barack Obama's "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" foreign policy doctrine to soar towards unreachable stupidity heights.

Every October I foolishly get my hopes up as the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize approaches. My dream is that the committee will finally proclaim that the greatest obstacle to world peace is American Imperialism.

And then they will elaborate on this by insisting that only when the U.S. Empire has vanished, can global harmony and justice prevail. Therefore, they award the prize to some courageous writer or film-maker or activist who has been battling this death-spewing Leviathan.

But once more they have refused to notice the 800 pound War Lord in the middle of the room. They have again chosen the "path most taken - the spineless one," and bestowed the award on some noble but uncontroversial candidates. By misdirecting our attention away from the indisputably evil scourge that is U.S. foreign policy, they have once again blockaded the road to actual Peace on Earth.

But perhaps I should question why I even expect those at the Nobel to be noble. After all, they somehow forget to bestow the prize on the greatest peacemaker and liberator of the 20th Century - Mahatma Gandhi. And then they intensified the shame of such an oversight, by bequeathing the award to one of the most genocidal monsters of the same century - Henry Kissinger.

He received the prize even though he master-minded the secret and massive bombing assault on the innocent peasants of Laos and Cambodia. He was also instrumental in enabling the murderous regimes in East Timor and Chile. In all of these atrocities, he denied his involvement until the evidence finally drowned his lies in truth.

Welcome to the official radio show of Sott.net, your source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events. Each week, Sott.net editors Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley analyze global impact events that shape our world and future, and connect the dots to reveal the bigger picture obscured by mainstream programming.

From the crisis in Ukraine to the ISIS in Iraq, from increasingly extreme weather to surviving in a world ruled by psychopaths, your hosts, their colleagues (and occasional guests) explore the deeper truths driving world events by exposing the manipulations behind what passes for 'news'.

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While Kiev continues to drop bombs on the regions, polling stations are now open in the People's Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Around a hundred international observers (from Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Hungary, Greece, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, South Ossetia, and the United States) are monitoring the elections. A Hungarian observer of the absentee polling for refugees in Russia reported today: "Everything is going, as it should. We have exposed no violations so far."

South Ossetia's Parliament Speaker Anatoly Bibilov told RIA Novosti: "[The elections are] organized on a quite high level, people are eagerly going to the polling stations, I don't notice any violations." And a German observer in Lugansk, chief editor of the German monthly magazine Zuerst!, Manuel Ochsenreiter, told reporters:

It's well organized, also it's a big challenge. Now everything is calm and peaceful, no provocations or violations ... We were visiting polling stations. They are all very crowded, it's a huge interest of the population at the elections. You can see it by masses of people standing inside and in front the polling stations.

The vote comes just one week after Kiev's own elections, which, despite being accepted as legitimate by countries like the U.S. and Russia, were plagued by violations, threats, and violence.

Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had "tortured some folks" as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution.

The report describes the post-9/11 torture program as "breathtaking in scope", and indicts both the Bush and Obama administrations for complicity in it - the former through design and implementation, and the latter through its ongoing attempts to obstruct justice. Noting that the program caused grievous harm to countless individuals and in many cases went as far as murder, the report calls for the United States to "promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing, or consenting in any way to acts of torture."

In specifically naming former President George W. Bush, Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo and former CIA contractor James Mitchell, among many others, as individuals who sanctioned torture at the highest levels, the report highlights a gaping hole in President Obama's promise to reassert America's moral standing during his administration. Not only have the cited individuals not been charged with any crime for their role in the torture program, Obama has repeatedly reiterated his mantra of "looking forward, not backwards" to protect them from accountability.

For months now, Western mass media have been in lockstep with the US State Department and the NATO military alliance, promulgating claims of Russian aggression in Ukraine and towards Europe generally. The mantra-like repetition of these claims, with scant substantiation, resembles the Big Lie technique of Third Reich master propagandist Josef Goebbels. Told often and brazenly enough, the claims acquire normalcy as "accepted facts".

Western news media, from the BBC to the New York Times, uncritically peddle NATO and Washington claims that Moscow has "annexed" Crimea and infiltrated troops into eastern Ukraine to destabilise the pro-Western "government" in Kiev. Last month at the NATO summit in Wales, outgoing secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen asserted: "So we continue to call on Russia to pull back its troops from Ukrainian borders, [and] to stop the flow of weapons and fighters into Ukraine".

Last week, that narrative was debunked by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE has been appointed to monitor the border between Russia and eastern Ukraine. The organisation's monitoring chief Paul Picard confirmed that since the beginning of its observer mission at the end of July to present, it has not recorded any movement of military equipment or units from Russia into Ukrainian territory.

"The movement of military equipment has not been seen by the OSCE from our border point [of observation]", said Picard during a press conference in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don last week.

The OSCE monitoring chief did say that there was Russian military movement of airplanes, helicopters and drones inside Russian territory along the border, but that there was no cross-border incursion. "We observed their movement, but didn't see them fly into Ukraine, so they did not cross the border", Picard said.

Tellingly, the OSCE assessment nullifying Washington and NATO claims of Russian invasion and infiltration of Ukraine was given negligible reportage in the Western media, which persists with the anti-Russian narrative that seems to operate on the basis of not letting the facts intrude on a convenient storyline.

As Election Day approaches, two reports show us exactly how corrupted our political system has become. Unless voters come out in force, it looks like corporate money is about to buy itself another house of Congress.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed filings from the Federal Election Commission and concluded that

In a significant shift, business groups gave more money to Republican candidates than to Democrats in seven of the most competitive Senate races in recent months, in some cases taking the unusual step of betting against sitting senators.

The Journal found that corporate PACs gave most of their donations to Democrats in the early part of the campaign. That fits with a longstanding pattern: big-business interests shower incumbents with money to encourage special treatment, both during the election year and in the upcoming term.

But giving has shifted dramatically since June. The Journal discovered that Republican candidates received the lion's share of corporate campaign contributions in the July-to-September time period. The cash-generating power of incumbency had faded -- for Democrats.

One reason for the shift, according to sources, is a sense that Democrats are the underdogs. "Wall Street expects return on investment," a brokerage executive told the Journal. "It makes no sense to contribute to a losing campaign."

Israel has said it's shutting the only two operating Gaza border crossings indefinitely. This comes a day after a projectile hit Israel from the strip, but caused no damage. Border closures threaten to isolate already devastated Gaza completely.

The move will affect both the Kerem Shalom and Erez border crossings, Haartez reported, quoting Israel's defense establishment. The authorities have notified the Palestinians of the decision.

Meanwhile, the three other crossings into Gaza are still not operational and the passage from the area into Egypt - the Rafah crossing - remains closed.

From now on and until further notice, only critical humanitarian aid going into Gaza will be allowed via the Erez crossing.