Aliens were responsible for a series of unexplained fires in fridges, TVs and mobile phones in an Italian village, according to an Italian government report. Canneto di Caronia, in northern Sicily, drew attention three years ago after residents reported everyday household objects bursting into flames.

TV news footage at the time showed electrical appliances as well as cookers, a pile of wedding presents and furniture smouldering. Dozens of experts including scientists, electrical engineers and military boffins, arrived in the village 60 miles east of Palermo to investigate the phenomenon.

Arson was quickly ruled out and at one stage an amazed scientist was interviewed after he described how he saw an unplugged electrical cable burst into flames.

Locals were quick to blame supernatural forces and at the time the Vatican's chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth backed up their fears and said: "I've seen things like this before. Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods. Let's not forget that Satan and his followers have immense powers."

In early November, while celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk proclaimed that "the Ukrainian army has been fighting and winning for 20 months." This was a startling announcement for the head of a government which has lost pretty much everything that it is possible to lose due to lack of professionalism and stupidity.

Taking a look at the dry figures - the armed forces of Ukraine currently consist of 188,000 troops. Over the past year the number of generals has risen by 60% - from 121 in 2014 to 201 in September of 2015. In other words, the Ukrainian army now has one general for every 935 soldiers. What tangible successes have we seen from this intellectual machine that grows more bloated each month?

Attentive observers of global politics may have noticed that when 'terror attacks' take place, Western authorities usually have a preprepared narrative about what happened and which terror group was responsible that is quickly pitched to the media and public. On very rare occasions however, such events are met with an uncharacteristic silence from the halls of Western power, at least for the crucial initial few days when the public mind is 'open' to impressions...

Such was the case with the downing of a Russian plane over the Sinai, when Western governments came close to saying absolutely nothing about the crash other than it had to be investigated. This was, of course, shocking to many people. After all, the authorities are meant to be authoritative and give us the simple black and white explanations we all crave so we can go back to sleep.

While the Russian government has repeatedly called for everyone to refrain from jumping to conclusions before any actual investigation had taken place, after their few days of relative silence, the US and British government officials couldn't restrain themselves from pushing the terror threat into the collective face of the global public.

British 'intelligence' has led the recent campaign to convince the world that a bomb, and therefore 'ISIS', brought down the Russian plane. The evidence for this claim involves unnamed British intelligence personnel simply saying 'it was probably a bomb'. When pressed for actual evidence however, they refer to "chatter" they "picked up" after the crash, where "ISIS militants" celebrated the event. In intelligence terms, "chatter" today usually means some tea boy at MI6 HQ seeing a post by an alleged jihadi on FB.

The closest we can get to non-social-media-based evidence for a bomb on the plane are statements by various unnamed sources, some of them allegedly "close to the investigation". One such source told AFP that "everything was normal during the flight, absolutely normal, and suddenly there was nothing." He described the accident as a "violent, sudden" demise.

Meanwhile, a source with access to the black boxes told France 2 TV channel that a sound similar to that of an explosion could be heard on the recording. This information has led other "sources close to the investigation" to tell French news magazine Le Point that the Metrojet flight was "definitely blown up by an explosive device". This was apparently based on analysis of the black boxes by Russian, French, German and Irish investigators in Cairo.

Air forces from around the world have gathered deep in the Arava desert in the south of Israel for the past week and a half to take part in the largest aerial exercise in the history of the Israeli Air Force.

The "Blue Flag" exercise, which is continuing through November 3, pits the Israeli Air Force, the United States Air Force, Greece's Hellenic Air Force and the Polish Air Force against a fictional enemy state, the captain in charge of all IAF exercises told The Times of Israel Thursday night.

A number of other countries, including Germany, also sent pilots and officers to observe the exercise, but did not take part.

This joint drill is the second "Blue Flag" exercise; the first took place in 2013 and was the largest multi-lateral exercise the IAF had ever hosted.

The various air forces collaborated closely through every step of the current exercise, the IAF captain said, from planning to execution and finally to debriefing.

Militants in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, whose communications with Islamic State (ISIL) group's leadership indicated they could have been behind the crash of a Russian airliner in the area, spoke in British accents, the UK media reported.

The Telegraph newspaper said late Saturday it had picked up on reports suggesting that British-born jihadists could have been involved in the air tragedy in Sinai, a desert region where militant insurgency has been on the rise since last year.

The British outlet said it was too early to claim that perpetrators were British, but if confirmed this would move the issue of ISIL recruiting Britons high up the UK government's anti-terrorist agenda.

The US-led coalition has been "unbelievably" inefficient in fighting the terror group Islamic State, possibly because some members have their plans for the terrorists, Iraq's former PM told RT.

Nouri al-Maliki, who stepped down as the head of the Iraqi government last year and remains a vice-president, believes that Iraq was targeted by a "regional conspiracy" and is at risk of breaking up. He also said inviting Russia to target Islamic State targets in Iraq could play a positive part in the debacle.

Describing the effort of the international coalition led by the US to cripple ISIS fighters in Iraq, Maliki said it was "inefficient".

"It's unbelievable and unacceptable that more than 60 nations comprising this coalition that have the most modern aircraft and weapons at their disposal have been conducting their campaign in Iraq for 14 months and IS still remains in the country," he told RT's Arabic-language sister-channel Rusiya Al-Yaum.

Maliki cited the loss of the city of Ramadi and the major oil refining center Baiji to ISIS, both of which happened after the coalition started bombing the terrorists, as proof that not enough is being done by the coalition.

According to the leaders of the Saudi-led Arab coalition, military operations have entered their final stage in the civil war-torn Arabian nation of Yemen, but senior Moscow-based analyst Maxim Shepovalenko believes the Houthis have no intention of giving up yet.

Earlier last week at the International Institute of Strategic Studies' (IISS) Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir and his Yemeni counterpart agreed in their opinions that the coalition's military operations in Yemen have entered their final stage.


"I would say, and I'm an optimist by nature, that the Yemeni conflict has entered its final stage," Al-Jubier said. "We look forward and hope for a stable nation and a prosperous Yemen."

As investigators search for the cause of a plane crash that killed 224 people over the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday and Russia suspends all flights to Egypt, U.S. officials said they are taking unspecified precautionary measures to enhance the security of flights from the Middle East.

"While the facts and circumstances surrounding the tragic October 31 crash of Metrojet Flight 9268 on the Sinai Peninsula are still under investigation, Transportation Security Administrator (TSA) Peter Neffenger and I, out of an abundance of caution, have identified a series of interim, precautionary enhancements to aviation security with respect to commercial flights bound for the United States from certain foreign airports in the region," Jeh C. Johnson, secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.

The world's top oil importer wants traders to flock to yuan-based futures.

Crude oil is flowing eastward as rising demand in Asia outstrips the West's stagnant appetite. Next year, China wants traders—including oil speculators, refiners, and big state-owned companies that buy and sell futures contracts—to follow a similar path. By the end of 2015, China, the world's No. 1 oil importer as of April, may start its own crude futures contract.

The idea is to establish a Chinese rival to the world's two most traded oil contracts: (WTI), housed on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and Brent Crude Futures, owned by ICE Futures Europe in London. The yuan-based contract will trade on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange and will be among the first Chinese commodity contracts available to foreign investors as China promotes global use of its currency.

"Consumption has been shifting east since 2009," says Gordon Kwan, an analyst at Nomura Holdings in Hong Kong. "China could have more sway in setting benchmark prices with new crude contracts in Shanghai, potentially negatively impacting trading volumes in Brent and WTI over the next 10 years."

Despite the fact that Russia's military operations in Syria began only 1 month ago, regular combat reports from the Russian Ministry of Defence have already become a part of everyday life. Amidst the domestic public storm of emotions, accompanied by thousands of propaganda pieces on Assad's political opponents, victorious or apocalyptic predictions about the prosptects of a military operation, we can now begin to sum up the interim results of the onset of the Syrian government forces with the support of the Russian aviation.

The results of the first week: 151 sorties, destroyed 79 objects.

September 30 - 20 sorties, 8 objects destroyed;
October 1 - 18 sorties, destroyed 12 objects;
October 2 - 28 sorties, destroyed 19 facilities;
October 3 - 20 sorties, 9 objects destroyed;
October 4 - 20 sorties, destroyed 10 objects;
October 5 - 25 sorties, 9 objects destroyed;
October 6 - 20 sorties, destroyed 12 objects.

The results of the second week: 360 sorties, destroyed 344 objects + Operation 26 "caliber."

October 7 - 26 launch of "caliber" of data on the aircraft not;
October 8 - 22 sorties, destroyed 27 objects (only night departures);
October 9 - 67 sorties, destroyed 60 objects;
October 10 - 64 sorties, destroyed 55 facilities;
October 11 - 64 sorties, destroyed 63 of the object;
October 12 - 55 sorties, destroyed 53 objects;
October 13 - 88 sorties, destroyed 86 objects.