US claims to be waging war against "Islamic State" whose various "al-Baghdadi" leaders do not exist.

In 2007, the New York Times revealed that long-vilified "Islamic State" leader Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi did not exist, and that the creation of this fictional character was a ruse to obfuscate the role of foreigners in the creation and perpetuation of "Al Qaeda in Iraq."

Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.In an article titled, "Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says," the NYT reports.

The NYT would also reveal the purpose of the deception:

The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization.

The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.

The admission by US military leaders, reported in the NYT, reveals that the so-called "Islamic State" was nothing more than an appendage of Al Qaeda - with Al Qaeda itself directly armed, funded, and backed by stalwart US allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Despite the NYT and the Pentagon's admissions, the entire ruse has continued, on an exponential scale.

Yanis Varoufakis, widely tipped to be Syriza's new finance minister, tells Paul Mason what they would do if they get into government in Greece, and admits the prospect of power in Europe is "scary".

"Get out of here, you low-life scum," Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) said to demonstrators who interrupted a congressional hearing in Washington on Thursday. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was scheduled to speak at the hearing.

C-SPAN was broadcasting the morning hearing of the United States Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by McCain, and caught the senior lawmaker live on camera as he verbally unloaded on protesters from the DC-based group Code Pink.

Kissinger, who is best known for his role in the administration of President Richard Nixon during the height of the Vietnam War, encountered jeers from the protesters as soon as he entered the Senate chamber.

At a recent PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) rally in Frankfurt, Israeli psychologist Dr. Rotem Avituv gave a disturbing speech that evoked the rhetoric of the Nazi era. Wrapped in a German flag with an Israeli flag apparently fluttering close by, Avituv told the cheering crowd:

"We will stand together and deal with the real Nazis. The Nazis are inside the Islam mentality. In those who want to sell Germany for votes ... you are the true spirit of Germany, Islam wants to take you and drink from the milk of Germany. But they're not Germans, they do not love you. they love themselves. For many years I have looked at Germany...never feel ashamed of yourselves, not even because of the past, you and I are one, we are brothers! The Muslims say we are Islamophobe, yes! I am Islamophobe, because phobia is fear and I am afraid of murder, I am afraid to be raped, I want Germany to be safe...Fuck you, we are stronger, we will win!"

The US is constructing a global system of bilateral and multilateral alliances to assist it in more efficiently projecting power throughout the 21st century. As the world moves towards multipolarity, the US is prepared to exploit this trend to its geopolitical advantage.

Instead of 'going it alone' as Bush was prone to do, the US is now finding ways to get others to do its dirty work by convincing its 'partners' that they have a shared interest in doing so. During the 2011 War on Libya, France and the UK took the helm while the US, as it was described, "Led From Behind". A New York Times editorial at the time defined this as "discreet US military assistance with [others] doing the trumpeting". Four years later, this concept has grown out of its Libyan test tube and gone global, with the US setting up similar alliance systems all throughout the world in order to indirectly project its will in key regions. As the cynical saying goes, "Why do for yourself what others can do for you?"

'Friends' Across The World

Let's take a look at the US' Lead From Behind (LFB) partners, beginning from the Western Hemisphere and moving eastward:

Latin America:

The US works closely with the Pacific Alliance, a neo-liberal economic trading group composed of close allies Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. Their shared goal is to counter the leftist economic vision emanating from Venezuela and to dismantle its geopolitical resistance network of Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The end result is to surround and contain Brazil in case it ever decides to seriously counter the US' influence.

As Japanese exporters enjoy an earnings boost from the weakened yen, their rivals in South Korea are struggling with a stronger won. Hyundai Motor's net income fell 14 percent in 2014, the biggest decline since 2008. The automaker's subsidiary, Kia Motors, suffered a 22 percent drop in profits, with earnings in the fourth quarter collapsing 54 percent. The picture isn't bright for Korean retailers, either. Consumers are spending less at department stores Lotte Shopping and Shinsegae.

The bad results are adding to worries that the South Korean economy may soon stumble into a Japan-style deflationary trap. Consumer prices rose just 0.8 percent in December compared with a year earlier, and Samsung Securities expects prices in 2015 to rise less than 1 percent. From last October to December, the economy grew 0.4 percent over the previous quarter, and domestic demand contracted 0.6 percent. "Korea's economic momentum faded quickly at the end of last year," Mark Walton, a senior economist with BNP Paribas, wrote in a Jan. 27 report. "The breadth of the slowdown hints at a deep-seated malaise."

Did you ever think about what your life would be like if the stores were closed? I'm not talking about a post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario or a winter storm that clears the shelves. I'm talking about a long-term disruption of services caused by an economic collapse.

What if you couldn't run to Wal-Mart to get soap? What if the grocery store had supplies so limited that they were rationed out to people in such small amounts that the food you got was not enough to meet your needs? What if there were no diapers for your baby or aspirin to cure a headache?

This is exactly what happens in a serious economic collapse. It happened a couple of years ago in Greece, and it's happening right now in Venezuela. Bloomberg.com reports a scene of desperation:

Long lines, some stretching for blocks, formed outside grocery stores in the South American country's capital as residents search for scarce basic items such as detergent and chicken.

"I've visited six stores already today looking for detergent - I can't find it anywhere," said Lisbeth Elsa, a 27-year-old janitor, waiting in line outside a supermarket in eastern Caracas. "We're wearing our dirty clothes again because we can't find it. At this point I'll buy whatever I can find."

European Union foreign ministers extended existing sanctions against Russia on Thursday, holding off on tighter economic measures for now but winning the support of the new left-leaning government of Greece, whose position had been in doubt.

The ministers agreed to extend until September travel bans and asset freezes imposed last year that had been due to expire. They also agreed to list the names of additional people who could be targeted with sanctions when they meet again on Feb. 9.

They dropped language, however, about drawing up "further restrictive measures" that had appeared in a pre-meeting draft. The bloc's foreign policy chief said a decision on such measures would be left to EU leaders meeting next month.

If people stash their wealth or earn income overseas, that is fine with us - just as long as their tax authorities get the information they need to tax that wealth or income according to the law, and as long as money laundering and financial crimes can be effectively tracked, and so on. Where there are cross-border barriers to the instruments of democratic societies, then there is an offshore problem.

The only credible way to provide the necessary information is through so-called automatic information exchange (AIE), where governments make sure the necessary information is available across borders, as a matter of routine.

For years we at the Tax Justice Network were ridiculed for advocating AIE: pie in the sky, many people said. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the club of rich countries that dominates international rule-making on tax and tax-related information sharing, was for years pushing its so-called Internationally Accepted Standard which was, well, the internationally accepted standard for cross-border information exchange, despite being only slightly better than useless. The message was that we should just accept this, and move on.

How the world has turned since a couple of years ago. The OECD is now in the middle of putting in place a system - known as the Common Reporting Standards (CRS) - to implement automatic information exchange (AIE). The CRS is the first ever potentially global system of AIE, and although it has major shortcomings and loopholes, it's potentially a giant step forwards from a largely transparency-free past.

Meanwhile the European Union had been moving ahead with plans to beef up its own, older plans for AIE, notably through amendments to tighten up its loophole-ridden Savings Tax Directive and other initiatives. The United States, for its part, has been rumbling forwards with its Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which is, at least technically speaking from a self-interested U.S. perspective, fairly strong. In fact, the OECD's CRS is modeled on FATCA.

But - and here comes a big 'but' - how do these different initiatives mesh together? Might anything fall between the cracks?

The European Union, for its part, seems to be working hard and in fairly straightforward fashion to get its ducks in line with the CRS, the OECD's emerging global standard. It will be incorporating a lot of the OECD technical standards into EU law, in cut-and-paste fashion, and will add categories to include in the mix: such as covering the all-important insurance sector more comprehensively than the CRS does, and covering other categories of income and capital including income from employment, directors' fees, pensions, and ownership of and income from immovable property.

But the United States' position on meshing FATCA with the global standards? Well, now there's a story.

Ukraine's subversive hacker group CyberBerkut has published documents allegedly exposing dreadful situation with the Kiev's troops attacking separatist forces in the East: war crimes, tremendous loss of lives and wholesale desertion of entrapped troops.

The anti-government activists claim they have hacked personal computer of Ukraine's Judge Advocate General and copied a number of classified documents. These documents are allegedly exposing some dark secrets of Kiev's authorities regarding the real state of things in the zone of the so-called 'anti-terrorist operation' in the eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the country.

The price of the warfare resumed by President Petro Poroshhenko in the east is terrifying. The hacked documents claim at least 1,100 servicemen of the Ukrainian army have lost their lives over the period of the last two weeks. Many dozens Ukrainian soldiers gave up to separatist forces. Ukrainian army has lost over 100 tanks and the armored vehicles.