The problems of the Middle East and North Africa are being compounded by a lack of "Western involvement," former Tory Foreign Secretary William Hague has claimed in a surprise intervention.

Hague, who headed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) between May 2010 and July 2014, said without foreign guidance the region's booming population, as well as "religious hatred, poor governance" and a "lack of economic success," would see Europe flooded with migrants.

Acknowledging some of the mistakes of the UK's 2011 war in Libya and its disastrous aftermath, Hague wrote in the Telegraph: "There is a danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from this experience, and enfeebling ourselves with a reluctance to send force overseas just when we will have a vital need to do so."

The rather repulsive sight of US puppet-in-chief Obama grovelling before Saudi royals last week, while US media sounds off on the shocking (not) 'revelation' that the House of Saud was instrumental in carrying out 9/11, point to interesting developments in the Western oil war against Russia. Pepe Escobar has proposed that US intervention was the reason for the recent last-minute failure by the world's leading oil producers to cut oil production, a deal that would have led to a rise in oil prices and given the Russians more room to maneuver by decreasing pressure on their state budget.

This came at a time when increased oil prices would benefit both Russia and Saudi Arabia - the Saudis are now more dependent on oil revenue than at any time in the past 40 years. But the Saudis, apparently with Washington's gun to their heads in the form of a threat to expose the Saudi role in 9/11, announced that the oil war was back on by announcing that they would instead flood the market.

Bearing in mind that the House of Saud is, essentially, the West's original Islamic State, their reneging on the oil cut deal is unsurprising. The very purpose of the Royal Head-chopping Kingdom has been to police the region and be a 'proxy force' that the West can use to do its dirty work. They've fulfilled that role brilliantly for decades, arming and inspiring thousands of terrorists, while turning the wealth of the Middle East into monopoly money for the West.

After the deal fell through, the Russian energy minister Alexander Novak essentially said 'We're sick of the games - bring it on', calling the Saudis' bluff by declaring that if they followed through on their threat to pump even more oil onto the markets, thus driving prices down further, and stating that Russia would respond by vastly increasing its own production.

The White House has signaled readiness to boost military aid to Israel to a historic high, after a letter signed by 83 Senators advocated for the increase. Aid to Israel currently accounts for more than half the total US military aid budget.

Relations between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been frosty in recent years. Netanyahu canceled his planned trip to the US last month and said he intended to negotiate the increase with the next US president, according to the Times of Israel. Now, however, the Obama administration is saying it is willing to boost military aid to Israel to historically unprecedented levels.

"We are prepared to sign an MOU [memorandum of understanding] with Israel that would constitute the largest single pledge of military assistance to any country in US history," a White House official told Reuters on Monday.

The Russian military brought 4.5 tons of humanitarian aid and provided urgent medical help to Syrians in the Damascus and Aleppo provinces, the Defense Ministry said late Sunday.

"Ruheiba (Damascus province) and Abtin (Aleppo province) have received 4.5 tons of humanitarian cargoes," the Russian center for reconciliation said in a bulletin.

Aid workers from the Hmeymim-based center in the western Latakia region offered medical assistance to 22 civilians, the ministry said, adding more humanitarian convoys for people in the Damascus province were being loaded.

Russia has been mediating a ceasefire in parts of Syria since February. More than 50 armed groups have so far signed up to the truce with the government. The lull in fighting has enabled Russia to deliver tonnes of aid cargo, mostly food, to residents in the war-torn country.

In the desert climate of Scottsdale, Arizona, rest 147 brains and bodies, all frozen in liquid nitrogen with the goal of being revived one day.

It's not science fiction — to some it might not even be science — yet thousands of people around the world have put their trust, lives and fortunes into the promise of cryonics, the practice of preserving a body with antifreeze shortly after death in hopes future medicine might be able to bring the deceased back.

"If you think back half a century or so, if somebody stopped breathing and their heart stopped beating we would've checked them and said they're dead," said Max More, CEO of the Scottsdale-based Alcor. "Our view is that when we call someone dead it's a bit of an arbitrary line. In fact they are in need of a rescue."

That "rescue" begins the moment a doctor declares a patient dead. Alcor's team then prepares an ice bath and begins administering 16 medications and variations of antifreeze until the patient's temperature drops to near freezing.

"The critical thing is how fast we get to someone and how quickly we start the cooling process," More said. In order to ensure that can happen, Alcor stations equipped teams in the U.K., Canada and Germany and offers members a $10,000 incentive to legally die in Scottsdale, where the record for getting a patient cooled down and prepped for an operation is 35 minutes.

Next, a contracted surgeon removes a patient's head if the member selected Alcor's "Neuro" option, as it's euphemistically called, in hopes that a new body can be grown with a member's DNA once it comes time to be thawed out. It's also the much cheaper route. At a price tag of $80,000, it's less than half the cost of preserving your whole body. "That requires a minimum of $200,000, which isn't as much as it sounds, because most people pay with life insurance," More said.

In fact, such a business model is pretty consistent in the nonprofit cryonics community. Michigan-based Cryonics Institute offers a similar payment structure, albeit at the more affordable cost of just $28,000 for whole-body preservation. Which begs the question: Why the price discrepancy?

"We've been very conservative in the way we plan the financing," More said. "Of that $200,000, about $115,000 of it goes into the patient care trust fund," which is meant to cover eventual costs and is controlled by a board of trustees (a certain number of which is required to have loved ones currently in cryopreservation). More says the trust currently boasts a total of over $10 million, which is supported by Alcor's most recent nonprofit 990 filings.

Long discredited, the Monroe Doctrine, a policy set forth by President James Monroe that stipulates that the Western Hemisphere is America's backyard over which it exercises complete tutelage, has been dusted off by Barack Obama. The neo-Monroe Doctrine, which can be called the Obama Doctrine, has seen the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, State Department, and the Pentagon actively work to oust progressive leaders from power in Latin America.

The first leader to suffer under the Obama Doctrine was Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, ousted in a 2009 "constitutional coup" personally approved by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Moreover, Clinton's close friend, lawyer Lanny Davis, began lobbying in Washington for the new military junta-led government.

The U.S. admits that the upcoming Aleppo offensive by the Syrian government and its allies is designed to hit al-Qaeda and associated terrorist forces and not primarily the "moderate" unicorns the U.S. propaganda blushes about. But the openly U.S.-supported forces will also be hit as they are very much integrated with al-Qaeda. The U.S. has for long considered al-Qaeda a secret ally in its attempt to destroy the Syrian state. The French magazine L'Orient Le Jour sees the U.S. relation with al-Qaeda in Syria as part of the attrition strategy the U.S. is waging against Syria (and Russia).

Secretary of State Kerry tried to convince the Russians that al-Qaeda should not be attacked during the cessation of hostilities. But the Russian's did not agree. Al-Qaeda is a UN-recognized international terrorist organization which, under UNSC resolutions, must be fought. The U.S. only succeeded in downgrading the permanent ceasefire the Russians had preferred to into a temporary cessation hostilities. It thought to use the time to rearm and to regroup its proxy forces.

In 2003, David Petraeus, then a division commander in Iraq, famously asked "tell me how this ends?" in reference to the conflict just starting there. It was a good question then, and it's a good question now. The war against the Islamic State gets a lot of attention, much of it focused on the immediate: Is the war going better or worse this month than last month? Is the Islamic State gaining ground or losing it? Are U.S. air strikes killing more Islamic State leaders or fewer? But these things only matter if they contribute to an ultimate end to the conflict on terms the United States can live with. Will they?

In fact, we have a lot of evidence on wars like this and how they typically end. But it's not a very encouraging story. The Islamic State threat is likely to persist, in one form or another, for a long time. In the meantime, we're going to be stuck with a policy that amounts to containment and damage limitation, whose shortcomings will frustrate many Americans.

Over recent months I have often written about the potential of China's strategic One Belt, One Road Eurasian and Asian infrastructure Great Project to act as a global economic transformer toward positive, sustained economic growth. It's becoming clear by the day that strategic economic planners in Beijing have been working out specific details of how best to use the new high-speed rail infrastructure project spanning the vast space of Eurasia from Beijing across Russia and the states of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union including Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus and on to the west to include, so far, states of eastern and central Europe. A series of recent agreements by Chinese companies in Kazakhstan gives a hint of the economic boom being planned.

As I have written in previous posts, China's One Belt, One Road project, currently the largest real economy infrastructure project in the world, is not merely about building faster rail pathways from China across Eurasia's vast landmass to Europe to hasten freight delivery times. It's about transforming one of the previously most forgotten regions of the world into a vibrant and growing new economic space, about bringing technology and industry into some very backwater parts of Central Asia that also happen to be blessed with some of the world's richest minerals concentrations. Without modern transportation infrastructure, those mineral and other riches lay dormant.

For China, the One Belt, One Road is also referred to as the New Silk Road, a reference to the ancient Eurasian overland trade routes and sea routes linking China trade to that of all Eurasia, the now-Middle East and on to Venice and Europe some two thousand years ago initiated by China's Han Dynasty. At that time, the Silk Road routes went from China through India, Asia Minor, up through Mesopotamia to Egypt, the African continent, Greece, Rome, and even Britain. The northern Mesopotamian region, today Iran, became China's closest partner in trade.

As it turns out, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump share something pertinent in common, after all — a tax haven cozily nested inside the United States.

This brick-and-mortar, nondescript two-story building in Wilmington, Delaware would be awfully crowded if its registered occupants — 285,000 companies — actually resided there. What's come to be known as the "Delaware loophole" — the unassuming building at 1209 North Orange Street — has become, as the Guardian described, "famous for helping tens of thousands of companies avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in tax."

Reportedly dozens of Fortune 500 companies — Coca-Cola, Walmart, American Airlines, and Apple, to name a few — use Delaware's strict corporate secrecy laws and legal tax loopholes by registering the North Orange Street address for official business.

"Big corporations, small-time businesses, rogues, scoundrels, and worse — all have turned up at the Delaware address in hopes of minimizing taxes, skirting regulations, plying friendly courts or, when needed, covering their tracks," the New York Times' Leslie Wayne described in 2012. "It's easy to set up shell companies here, no questions asked."