More calls are coming in to federalize Ukraine. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy jumped on the bandwagon with his 5-year political anniversary speech in Paris this week. As reported by RT:

Quoting "1,000 deaths" in the country since the cease-fire agreement was reached in Minsk on September 5, Van Rompuy said he could no longer call the situation a cease-fire. And a new cessation of conflict, if controlled by the same players, would have the identical outcome, the politician said in his speech, marking his five years presidency of the European Council.

Urging a "global solution," the EU chief said a way for Ukraine to become a "decentralized (or federalized) country" must be found. He called for the country's closer ties with the EU. However, he also said, "Europe has become unpopular among Europeans" in the past five to six years.

Kiev should "establish a correct relationship with Russia, its neighbor, with which it shares history, culture and language," Van Rompuy said, adding that the interests of minorities in Ukraine should be respected.

Sharing his EU "experiences and perspectives" with students at the Sciences Po institute of political studies in Paris, he pointed out that the current crisis in Ukraine is "the most grave geopolitical crisis we've experienced in Europe since the end of the Cold war." What makes it even worse, according to the Rompuy, is the fact that the "war" is happening on European soil.

Van Rompuy is not the first European politician to suggest Ukraine's federalization. Earlier in August, Germany's Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who is also the country's economy minister, spoke out for federalization to be introduced in Ukraine once the conflict in the east of the country is resolved.

The same measures to help settle the crisis in eastern Ukraine have been voiced by Moscow. However, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko keeps ruling out such political changes, saying the country's federalization is out of question.

The city of Irving, Texas has experienced five earthquakes in four days, leading some critics to blame increased seismic activity on nearby fracking operations.

The first earthquake, Saturday night, was a magnitude 3.3 quake that was felt by hundreds of North Texans. A 2.5-magnitude quake hit on Sunday, followed by two more on Monday, magnitudes 2.2 and 2.3. And a fifth 2.7-magnitude earthquake was reported Tuesday evening just east of the University of Dallas campus.

Residents and city leaders point to area oil and gas disposal wells, where fracking wastewater is injected deep underground, as likely culprits. There is a wastewater disposal well near the epicenter of Saturday's quake.

"We are guinea pigs in the middle of this fracking experiment. Texas homes are built to withstand wind, not earthquakes," Sharon Wilson, an organizer for the advocacy group Earthworks, told Reuters. "Who will pay for the damage to private property?"

Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, agreed: "People are scared," he told Newsradio 1200 WOAI. "They are not used to waking up to find their homes shaking. The connection between fracking and earthquakes is obvious."

A study published last month backs up such claims. Looking at data from National Science Foundation seismographs located near fracking sites, scientists in Ohio were able to make direct connections between at least 400 small "micro-earthquakes" and nearby fracking operations in that state.

Mikhail Khazin is a mathematician and economist in Russia (graduated from Moscow State University in 1984). After working in various government and banking positions, he was discharged from his position as Deputy Chief of the Economic Directorate for attempting to fight corruption during Russia's failed experiment at privatization in 1997. Since 2000, he has worked as a consultant. He's an acquaintance of President Putin and is well informed of Kremlin politics, including the behind-the-scenes power struggles.

Besides being an expert economist, he seems to have a knack for predicting major world events. In 2000 he predicted the 2008 economic collapse (having previously predicted Russia's 1998 default). Then, on 10 September 2001, he predicted large-scale, U.S.-organized terror attacks as a cover for the States' economic deterioration. Now, in August of this year he predicted the end of a period of consumption stimulated by credit and a fresh round of bankruptcies and unemployment in the last quarter of 2014.

Back in September he had this to say about the current 'dollar economy': "There is nothing we will gain anymore from the dollar model. It's run dry." In October, he appeared on Russian TV with Putin advisor Sergey Glazyev to discuss the economy, sanctions, and Russia's central bank. (For more on Glazyev's views, in his own words, see: Putin advisor examines the threat of war and the Russian response.)

These are bleak times. I've been in serious conversation with some deep sources and interlocutors - those who know but don't need to show off, privileging discretion. They are all deeply worried. This is what one of them, a New York strategic planner, sent me:

The propaganda attack against Putin equating him with Hitler is so extreme that you have to think that the Russians cannot believe their ears and cannot trust the United States anymore under any circumstances.

I cannot believe how we could have gotten ourselves into this situation to protect the looters in the Ukraine that Putin would have rid the Ukraine of, and even had the gall to place in a leadership role one of the worst of the thieves. But that is history. What is certain is that MAD [mutually assured destruction] is not a deterrent today when both sides believe the other will use nuclear weapons once they have the advantage and that the side that gains a decisive advantage will use them. MAD is now over.

That may sound somewhat extreme - but it's a perfectly logical extension, further on down the road, of what the Russian president intimated in his already legendary interview with Germany's ARD in Vladivostok last week: the West is provoking Russia into a new Cold War. [1]

Just another day of insanity on the big blue marble. First up, Afghanistan:

Afghan drug traffic most serious threat to post-Soviet states - Russian official

"The growing scope of illegal spread of drugs is a serious threat to security, stability and health of people in CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organization] member states as well as in other countries in the region," Zmeevsky said.

Opium production has grown considerably in Afghanistan this year - to 6.4 tons (5.5 tons last year). UN experts warn about further worsening of the situation, the Russian official said.

Against the alarming background, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization demonstratively ignores Russia's persistent calls for establishing cooperation with the CSTO. "They just refused to talk with us," he said. In his words, "it is out of the logic of the uncompromising fight against the Afghan drug threat."

NATO even hinted that the alliance, for ideological reasons, did not consider the CSTO as an equal organization, he added.

"It sounds not only challenging, but also disrespectful, first of all for tens of thousands of their citizens who have become victims of the Afghan heroin narcobusiness expansion in NATO countries," Zmeevsky said.

That's the whole point. The Taliban had almost stopped opium production entirely in 2001. The U.S. invasion changed that immediately, and Afghanistan has been a U.S. vassal state ever since, with slight attempts at resistance from ex-President Karzai. (See Corey Schink's SOTT Exclusive: SOTT Exclusive: Psychopathic "fun and games" continue in Afghanistan) The opium trade serves not only as a way of destabilizing 'enemy no. 1' (i.e., Russia), but also to line the coffers of the CIA's black budget.

OPEC policy on crude production will ensure a crash in the U.S. shale industry, a Russian oil tycoon said.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries kept output targets unchanged at a meeting in Vienna today even after this year's slump in the oil price caused by surging supply from U.S shale fields.

American producers risk becoming victims of their own success. At today's prices of just over $70 a barrel, drilling is close to becoming unprofitable for some explorers, Leonid Fedun, vice president and board member at OAO Lukoil (LKOD), said in an interview in London.

"In 2016, when OPEC completes this objective of cleaning up the American marginal market, the oil price will start growing again," said Fedun, who's made a fortune of more than $4 billion in the oil business, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. "The shale boom is on a par with the dot-com boom. The strong players will remain, the weak ones will vanish."

Oil futures in New York plunged as much as 3.8 percent to $70.87 a barrel today, the lowest since August 2010.

At the moment, some U.S. producers are surviving because they managed to hedge the prices they get for their oil at about $90 a barrel, Fedun said. When those arrangements expire, life will become much more difficult, he said.

Time is a killer on the battlefield when troops are wounded, but the Pentagon is betting that "hibernation" drugs being pioneered by an Australian researcher will mitigate that problem.

Dr. Geoffrey Dobson of Queensland's James Cook University and the Division of Tropical Health and Medicine hopes that through science they can essentially rewire the body's natural response to trauma so that deployed troops have enough time to get their injured comrades medical attention.

"During the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 87 percent of all deaths among allied soldiers occurred in the first 30 minutes, before they could get to a hospital," Dr. Dobson told an Australian news website Wednesday. "Nearly a quarter of these, almost a thousand people, were classified as having potentially survivable wounds. Time was the killer. The idea of our research is to save that thousand lives."

The goal is to change the human body's normal response to shock while also forcing it to provide enough blood pressure to vital organs to keep wounded individuals alive.

"You want to stabilize the system because of the long retrieval times in forward areas for these special operations soldiers," he said. "We increase the blood pressure to a low 'optimal' level sufficient for survival, we reduce inflammation and we correct the blood coagulation - stop it getting thinner."

Kiev is enforcing an economic blockade on eastern Ukraine, where banks are closed and cash machines and credit cards aren't working. Disrupted social payments to the elderly have become the most acute issue.

Only a handful of cash machines are still functional in the breakaway parts of the Donetsk and the Lugansk regions, after local banks received an order from Ukraine's central bank earlier this week to "suspend" operations.

This follows a controversial decree signed by Ukrainian President Petro Porishenko on November 16 that is now coming into effect. Kiev is cutting economic ties with rebel-held areas by freezing bank accounts and stopping social payments, including pensions.

"As soon as we regain control [over E. Ukraine], all of the payments will be carried out," Ukraine's PM, Arseny Yastenyuk, said on Wednesday. "We would have liked people in the Lugansk and the Donetsk regions to be able to get their payments now, but we can't send money there, because it gets stolen in banks and in cash delivery vehicles."

Those willing to withdraw whatever's left on their accounts have to spend hours standing in queues. And what's left is not much.

"I was getting my pension via Oshchadbank," a woman from Makeevka told RIA Novosti. "I have 3,000 hryvnas (around $200) left on my account. But I can't get them. There has been no money in the banking machine for a week already. How am I supposed to live? I don't even have money for my medicines."

The only option left for many in the breakaway areas is to go to nearby towns under Kiev's control and try to withdraw cash there. Many are trying to reissue their bank accounts in government-held areas, so as not to lose money. Queues at bus stations are huge.

Many mainstream media websites helped a fake video go viral this month. The video showing a young Syrian boy running through sniper fire to save a little girl, was exposed as a fake when the Norwegian producer Lars Klevberg made the fact public. One of the stated aims of the Norwegian film makers was to "see how the media would respond to a fake video." This article examines how that experiment went.

The western press very quickly accepted the video as real and used it to support the US administration's narrative on Syria. Many top US news sources began to spread the story. Even though the producer said he explicitly added big hints that the video was fake, like the children surviving multiple gun shots.

Propagating false stories on Syria, is nothing new for the western press. In the lead up to the conflict many stories were exposed as frauds, such as the Anti-government activist "Gay Girl in Damascus" which turned out to be a middle-aged American man in Scotland. Syrian Danny Abdul Dayem which was frequently interviewed by CNN was using fake gun fire and flames in his interviews.


The fake sniper video wasn't enough to support US government narratives by itself, as the now deleted original upload didn't suggest the identity of the snipers. So the west's media suggested that it was Syrian military snipers that were targeting the children without any evidence. Journalists failed to mention how they reached the conclusion that an actor in Malta was shot by the Syrian military. It may be that the western press is quick to trust pro-rebel sources, as the video was uploaded by the pro-rebel Sham Times along with their own twist.

That was the question posed last week by Public Eye, a counter-event to the World Economic Forum, as it sought a worthy winner for its "lifetime achievement award." For sure, Walmart - which has already won a Public Eye award in 2005 for labor rights violations in its global supply chain - faces stiff competition in the online poll. Among the other outstanding nominees for the world's worst corporation are Goldman Sachs, Chevron, Dow Chemical and Union Carbide.

Walmart's impeccable credentials for the world's worst corporation were covered last week by Truthout. The company denies a living wage, full-time work, predictable scheduling and employment security to its global workforce of 2.2 million people. It drives down wages and labor standards in its enormous global supply chain, most notably in the Bangladesh textile industry and the Thai shrimp industry. Walmart's contempt for the core labor and human rights of its global workforce and supply-chain workers is arguably second to none.