This Sunday's New York Times featured an in-depth account of the secret CIA operation to arm and train the so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels that was authorized by President Obama in the spring of 2013. In showing the extent of the financial, tactical, and strategic cooperation between the CIA and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the piece highlights one of the more serious problems with this, the latest in a long series of Washington's "splendid little wars."

In helping to carry out the geopolitical imperatives of the KSA in toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the United States now finds itself firmly on one side of the Sunni-Shia schism, where it has no business being. The Times article states that "from the moment the C.I.A. operation was started, Saudi money supported it" and that "estimates have put the total cost of the arming and training effort at several billion dollars."

Washington has not gotten away with an "Arab spring" in Syria, as Russia has clearly shown that it will not allow the United States to overthrow any leader who refuses to act on their orders, writes the Financial Times.

Syrian government troops supported by Russian aviation made a major breakthrough in Aleppo, and now it is safe to say that Moscow has all the chances to reverse the course of the conflict, the newspaper notes. If the forces of Assad are taking Aleppo, Moscow in talks on a ceasefire on Friday in Munich, will be able to play their most powerful cards.

Ending one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent years, Russia will be able to put the settlement of the Syrian crisis at the top of its major foreign policy victories. Firstly, in September, when Russia began airforce operations in Syria, it showed that, along with the United States, it is a nation with significant influence in the Middle East.

Three people have died and a further 18 were injured after a car bombing in southern Russia's Dagestan at a police checkpoint near the city of Derbent. Islamic State terrorists have claimed responsibility in a tweet. FSB says a local terrorist group was used for the job.

Reports say a Lada Priora approached the police checkpoint and the bomb was detonated. It was later determined that a police officer pulled the driver over to check their papers. Witnesses say this is when they heard a powerful blast.

The number of injured and dead includes police officers and civilians.

Persian Gulf states are seeking nuclear weapons to counter "bad guy" Iran and have held clandestine meetings with Israel despite not having official ties with Tel Aviv, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon revealed at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

"We see signs that countries in the Arab world are preparing to acquire nuclear weapons, that they are not willing to sit quietly with Iran on brink of a nuclear or atomic bomb," Ya'alon told fellow defense ministers on Sunday, the final day of the Munich Security Conference.

There is today a lot of indignation in "western" media over the Russian air campaign in Syria. One, two, three ... hospitals were bombed! And schools! An the rebels lost more villages! Barrel bombs! Cluster bombs! One must ask how many of these "hospitals" were really hospitals and not just quarters for Jihadi "rebels". From the videos that were published I could identify only one destroyed building that might have been a real hospital. But as ever, no medical equipment was visible in the debris. Could this probably arranged media assault be the preparation for some new false flag stunt or some other planned escalation?

Hardly any mentions was made today about continued Turkish shelling of Kurdish towns in Syria. As soon as the Syrian artillery will be near the border, in a week or so, such shelling will be answered and the situation will then escalate very fast.

The Russians promised that the The "Gates of hell" will be open in the coming months in Syria. The current massive Russian bombing is the beginning of that campaign. "Rebels" running away from a town due to bombing are not able to kill the Syrian soldiers that then enter that town. Houses and infrastructure can be rebuilt but dead soldiers cannot be resurrected. That is the simple rule that now guides the Syrian government campaigns. There are no hints yet of how exactly the liberation of Aleppo province, rebel-held parts of Aleppo city and in Idleb will proceed. There is a bigger campaign plan behind it but it is not yet visible.

Visible though is the Syrian plan of the Race to Raqqa against the Islamic State.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Russia's Chechen Republic, has said that the latest actions by pro-Western military forces in Syria show that in reality they do not intend to fully destroy ISIS and return power to the legitimate government of the country.

Kadyrov issued the comment Monday, soon after news agencies reported about planned military exercises by the Saudi-led anti-terrorist coalition, which includes over 20 Muslim nations. "We cannot exclude the possibility that by these exercises they are preparing themselves for active operations in Syria," the Chechen leader said in an Instagram post.

"But the [real] goals and tasks of this coalition lie on the surface. They want to prevent the full defeat of the 'Iblis State' and the restoration of peace in the region," Kadyrov said. He used the expression "Iblis State," or "Devil State," referring to the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIL and ISIS. Such a replacement has been proposed and promoted by Russian imams, who noted that using the word "Islamic" to describe terrorists was insulting to their faith.

"The plans of the authors of Middle Eastern wars and overthrows do not include the full liquidation of IS and the strengthening of Bashar Assad's power," Kadyrov wrote. "But they will have to put up with the fact that the rules of the game are now dictated not by the West and not by the United States."

The investigation conducted by police to investigate claims of sexual abuse by high-profile establishment figures does not have enough evidence to prosecute any of the alleged offenders, the Guardian reports.

However, the operation still believes that its central witness, known only as 'Nick', is still credible and says it has found evidence to back up his claims, the newspaper states.

Nick's testimony relates to the years between 1975 and 1984, and has implicated well-known members of the establishment, including Lords Bramall and Brittan, who were not charged but whose reputations suffered from being part of the scandal.

Information given to the police by Nick, who sparked an investigation almost 15 months ago, still has the potential to trigger new investigations, detectives say, and they believe more witnesses could come forward to help verify the claims.

Under the feudal mode of production, peasants were often allowed to cultivate plots of land for themselves on a rental basis. However, those tenant farmers rarely succeeded in becoming landowners in their own rights because a major share of what they harvested was taken away by landlords as rent, often leaving them with a bare subsistence amount of what they produced. When the harvest was poor, they incurred debt. If peasants were unable to pay off their debts, they could find themselves reduced to the condition of serfs or slaves.

Today, under conditions of market dominance by parasitic finance capital, a similar relationship can be detected between the powerful financial oligarchs (as feudal lords of our time), on the one hand, and the public at large (as peasant population of today), on the other. In the same manner as the landed aristocracy of times past extracted rent by virtue of monopolistic ownership of land, so today the financial oligarchy extracts interest and other financial charges by virtue of having concentrated the major bulk of national resources in their hands in the form of finance capital.

The Marxist term wage-slaves refers to those who, lacking capital or means of production, have only their labor power to sell to make a living. This describes the vast majority of people in today's capitalist societies whose sole means of subsistence is the sale of their capacity to work. "Just as the feudal-era serf had no choice but to enslave himself and his family to the manor-house lord, the modern-day serf must indenture himself to banks to own a car or home or buy a college education" [1].

In the latest edition of her book, Occupy Money, Professor Margrit Kennedy shows that today between 35 percent and 40 percent of all consumer spending is appropriated by the financial sector: bankers, insurance companies, non-bank lenders/financiers, bondholders, and the like [2]. Obviously, this means that, as Ellen Brown points out: "By taking banking back . . . governments could regain control of that very large slice (up to 40 per cent) of every public budget that currently goes to interest charged to finance investment programs through the private sector" [3].

A torrent of familiar propaganda has flooded the airwaves as the imminent collapse of Washington and its regional allies' proxy terrorist forces in Syria approaches. Predicated on "humanitarian concerns,"global audiences are reminded of the torrent of lies, fabrications, and deceit that preceded NATO's military intervention in Libya - a military intervention that has since left the North African nation utterly destroyed, perpetually divided, and large swaths of its territory under the control of Al Qaeda and the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS).

Virtually all headlines across the West now feature dramatic images of refugees, and children in particular, used for propaganda purposes to suggest the urgent need for Western military intervention.

Data has been published for the first time in Ukraine detailing the reactions of Ukrainian police and armed forces personnel stationed in Crimea at the time of the Maidan coup in February 2014 and the secession vote in Crimea one month later. The information was reported in the Ukrainian news outlet Interfax.com.ua on Feb 5, 2016.

Interfax reports the findings of a Rada (parliamentary) committee investigating the circumstances of the secession. The committee says that of the approximately 2,300 Ukrainian national police (SBU) personnel who were stationed in Crimea at the time, only 215 remained loyal to Kyiv.

Of the app. 20,320 armed forces members deployed in Crimea, 6,000 returned to Ukraine. The remainder, a large majority, pledged allegiance to the new, Republic of Crimea and the armed forces of Russia.

Crimea seceded from Ukraine and joined the Russian Federation after an overwhelming majority of the population (some 97 per cent of the 80 per cent who voted) approved the measure in a referendum on March 16, 2014.