This may seem like an abstruse parliamentary maneuver -- and it is -- but Mitch McConnell just escalated the judicial wars in a minor but meaningful way. If frustrated conservatives want the GOP Senate majority to "start acting like one," McConnell's decision eliminates a lever Democrats have been using to stymie some of President Trump's judicial picks. In that sense, he's very much acting like a majority leader; a Democratic one. Try not to let your eyes glaze over as you read the details of this move, which involves dramatically reducing the power of so-called "blue slips" on judges, with which Senators from the home state of a presidential selection have been able to withhold their consent in order to prevent that nomination from moving forward. Not anymore. McConnell warned Democrats that he was leaning this direction last month, hoping they'd abandon this form of partisan blockade. They didn't. So he's followed through on his threat -- via the Weekly Standard:

- Confirming judicial nominees has been elevated to a top priority in the Senate. "I decide the priority," McConnell said in an interview. "Priority between an assistant secretary of State and a conservative court judge-it's not a hard choice to make." And when nominees "come out of committee, I guarantee they will be dealt with," McConnell said. "Regardless of what tactics are used by Democrats, the judges are going to be confirmed."

- No longer will "blue slips" be allowed to deny a nominee a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and vote on confirmation. In the past, senators have sometimes barred a nominee from their state by refusing to return their slip to the committee, thus preventing a hearing and confirmation. "The majority"-that is, Republicans-will treat a blue slip "as simply notification of how you're going to vote, not as an opportunity to blackball," McConnell told me. The use of blue slips, he noted, is not a Senate rule and has "been honored in the breach over the years." Now it won't be honored at all.

- The so-called "30 hours rule"-which provides for 30 hours of debate on a nominee-won't be overturned. But McConnell vowed to set aside time for these debates. And he can make this happen because he sets the Senate schedule.

- Since Trump was inaugurated, judicial vacancies have grown from 106 to 149. Upcoming resignations will boost the number of vacancies to 166. The possibility of losing control of the Senate in 2018 has added to the concern among Republicans about the losing the chance to maximize the conservative influence in the federal courts. This, McConnell said, "is another reason to more quickly."

The United States and Britain - the two countries responsible for so many recent wars and conflicts - are at it again. This time, the diabolical double-act has North Korea in its sights, despite the risk that such an attack could ignite a global nuclear war.

Over the past week, US President Donald Trump has sharpened his bellicose rhetoric towards North Korea, now declaring that "only one thing works" in regard to the security crisis over the Korean Peninsula. That "one thing", according to Trump, is evidently the "military option".

For the past several months, the Trump administration has indeed repeatedly threatened the North Korean state led by Kim Jong-un with military force over the latter's nuclear weapons program. But the American threats have always been conveyed in the context that other options, including diplomacy, were also being considered, or even preferred.

YouTube's curation team are able to promote even non-trending videos on the platform by "using some kind of intervention" into algorithms controlling the website. This allows specific news organizations to be favored, Project Veritas revealed.

Investigative group Project Veritas secretly filmed Earnest Pettie, the Brand and Diversity Curation Lead at YouTube, who said he works "on a team that does provide some human inputs into a lot of the machinery of YouTube." This would mean that videos from specific news sources could be made to appear at the top of search results.

Petite explained how YouTube's so-called news carousel is formed: "It's above the search results, so at the very least, we can say this shelf of videos from news partners is legitimate news because we know that these are legitimate news organizations."

"People are searching for a topic that our systems know is a 'newsy' topic, so let's give them videos that we know to be newsy because we know we have these news partnerships."

"In very rare cases we will try to make up to the fact that something isn't in the trending tab," he admitted. "Use some kind of intervention to... encourage the thing to be there, basically."

The Russian Embassy has responded to reports in the Times newspaper that claims "concerns are growing" about the Kremlin's influence in Westminster for the sole, simple reason that British MPs are appearing on RT.

As with any other British media outlet, RT UK invites politicians from across the political spectrum to speak freely on a wide variety of issues. However, the Murdoch-owned, right-wing Times appears to have taken umbrage at this, 'naming and shaming' the Tory and Labour MPs who have appeared.

The Russian Embassy was quick to point out the Russophobia and hypocrisy of the Times' story, tweeting: "@TheTimes: by appearing on RT, British politicians help Putin. Does it mean that by appearing on BBC Russian politicians help May?"

A new Ukrainian education law fails to "strike a balance" between the official language and those of minorities, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) said in a resolution, adding that it is not conducive to "living together."

PACE expressed its concerns over the articles relating to education in minority languages in the law recently adopted by Kiev. It "entails a heavy reduction in the rights previously recognized to 'national minorities' concerning their own language of education," according to the document.

"The new legislation does not appear to strike an appropriate balance between the official language and the languages of national minorities," the resolution adopted by PACE on Thursday says. The document was supported by 82 members of the 110 who took part in the vote, RIA Novosti reports. Only 11 parliamentarians opposed it while 17 others abstained.

Russia and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea are currently celebrating the 69th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. The Soviet Union was among the earliest supporters of Pyongyang and Russia remains an important neighbour to North Korea, even though recent events in the wider world have put a mild strain on relations.

Earlier today, the Russian news agency Tass released an interview with the DPRK's Foreign Minsiter Ri Yong-ho, who generally spoke positively about the sate of relations between the neighbouring states.

In the last hour, Pyongyang announced that it has officially joined the list of countries that accept reality and understands that the Crimean peninsula is an integral part of the territory of the Russian Federation.

North Korea now joins, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Cuba, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe as countries which officially accept the position of Crimea. Many other countries de-facto understand that Crimea is Russian territory.

The move by Pyongyang is a gesture of good will that indicates, as stated in the North Korean Foreign Minister's Tass interview, the willingness of Pyongyang to begin cooperating in Russia's peace process for East Asia which includes tripartite cooperation between Moscow, Pyongyang and Seoul.

With Catalonian President Carles Puigdemont stepping back from the brink in the midst of rising tensions in Spain over the region's bid for independence, signing a declaration of independence but deciding to suspend its implementation, millions will have breathed a collective sigh of relief given the prospect of a severe response from Madrid.

Though tensions may have ratcheted down - at least temporarily - the underlying issue fueling this crisis, along with the various other crises that have been and are still unfolding around the world, has by no means been resolved. That issue is neoliberalism.

When Karl Marx wrote in his Communist Manifesto that modern "bourgeois society is the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells," he could have been describing today's crisis within neoliberalism, one that evinces no sign of abating anytime soon. In fact, far from abating it is a crisis that has merely been intensified by the actions of the economic elites and various governments which rule in their interests throughout the West and wherever Western liberal democratic ideas predominate. The current and escalating crisis engulfing Spain over Catalan independence is a case in point.

Having attended the mass opposition march and rally to Catalan independence in Barcelona on October 8, I was struck by the fact that were it not for this enveloping crisis of neoliberalism - involving the introduction of draconian austerity by the Spanish government in Madrid over the past few years - the eruption of separatist movements, growth of nationalism, xenophobia as the new normal within the political mainstream, would likely not be happening.

The more details that emerge about Russia's "sophisticated" efforts to sway the November election in favor of President Donald Trump, the more ridiculous Sen. Mark Warner's aggressive rhetoric sounds.

But instead of fading away, upcoming testimony from Facebook, Twitter and maybe Google will likely keep the story on life support for the foreseeable future, especially now that Congress has succeeded in browbeating all three of the tech giants mentioned above to admit that Russian agents were buying advertising or otherwise disseminating targeted propaganda on their platforms.

In its latest piece exploring the innerworkings of the Russia-led Facebook campaign to "sow discord" in the American electorate, the New York Times makes a stunning revelation - though its implications are clearly lost on America's paper of record.

Almost all of the content promoted by the Russia-backed Facebook groups was created by Americans, much of it by conservative news websites like the Conservative Tribune.

To wit...

"A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms.

In other words, the Russia groups did little more than amplify political messages that were already deafeningly broadcast by the grassroots movement that emerged to support President Donald Trump during his quest for the Republican nomination, and later, the presidency.

US whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who helped end the Vietnam War by releasing the so-called Pentagon Papers, has told RT that there may be similar documents on Afghanistan and Iraq. He is calling on whistleblowers to end those wars and prevent one with North Korea.

In 1971, Ellsberg exposed the secret history of the Vietnam War when he leaked the Pentagon Papers - a study of US-Vietnam relations from 1945 to 1967 - to the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as other newspapers. The documents detailed a pattern of deception around Vietnam, which spanned several successive presidential administrations, before the war even began.

In an exclusive interview with RT America's Sean Stone, Ellsberg says the US government most likely has similar documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "I suspect there is a lot of history of that written in CIA and White House annals," Ellsberg told RT, adding that the war in Afghanistan "doesn't just go back to 2001 or 2002, it goes back to 1979."

Ellsberg cited former President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who revealed in his memoirs how the US "deliberately instigated attacks" on the pro-Soviet Afghan regime in 1979 in order to "bring in Soviet intervention into the war, like ours in Vietnam." About a million Afghans died as a result of the Carter administration's support for Islamic fundamentalists, intended to give the USSR "their Vietnam," Ellsberg told RT.

Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that the treaty signed between the US and the Soviet Union on the elimination of nuclear and conventional missiles is "in jeopardy," stressing that scrapping the 1987 deal could end in "disastrous" consequences.

"This December will mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the treaty between the Soviet Union and United States on the elimination of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles..." the former Soviet leader wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post, referring to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

He went on to note the merits of the deal, citing the fact that Russia and the US reported in 2015 that 80 percent of the nuclear warheads accumulated during the Cold War had been decommissioned or destroyed.

However, Gorbachev - who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 - said the agreement is now "in jeopardy." "It has proved to be the most vulnerable link in the system of limiting and reducing weapons of mass destruction. There have been calls on both sides for scrapping the agreement," he wrote.