In early November, without warning, the Indian government declared the two largest denomination bills invalid, abolishing over 80 percent of circulating cash by value. Amidst all the commotion and outrage this caused, nobody seems to have taken note of the decisive role that Washington played in this. That is surprising, as Washington's role has been disguised only very superficially.

US-President Barack Obama has declared the strategic partnership with India a priority of his foreign policy. China needs to be reined in. In the context of this partnership, the US government's development agency USAID has negotiated cooperation agreements with the Indian ministry of finance. One of these has the declared goal to push back the use of cash in favor of digital payments in India and globally.

On November 8, Indian prime minster Narendra Modi announced that the two largest denominations of banknotes could not be used for payments any more with almost immediate effect. Owners could only recoup their value by putting them into a bank account before the short grace period expired at year end, which many people and businesses did not manage to do, due to long lines in front of banks. The amount of cash that banks were allowed to pay out to individual customers was severely restricted. Almost half of Indians have no bank account and many do not even have a bank nearby. The economy is largely cash based. Thus, a severe shortage of cash ensued. Those who suffered the most were the poorest and most vulnerable. They had additional difficulty earning their meager living in the informal sector or paying for essential goods and services like food, medicine or hospitals. Chaos and fraud reigned well into December.

In the West Junk Information And Junk Judgment Prevail

The Western world and that part of the world that partakes of Western explanations live in a fictional world.

We see this everywhere we look—in the alleged machinations of Russia to elect Donald Trump president of the US, in claims that Saddam Hussein and his (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the United States (a mushroom cloud over American cities), that Assad of Syria used chemical weapons against his own people, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, that a few Saudi Arabians outwitted the entirety of the US, EU, and Israeli intelligence services and delivered the greatest humiliation to the "world's only superpower" in the history of mankind, that Russia invaded Ukraine and could at any moment invade the Baltics and Poland, that the US rate of unemployment is 4.6%, that China's trade surplus with the US is due to Chinese currency manipulation, and so on and on.

Allegedly we live in a scientific era of information, but what good can come from faulty orchestrated information? As long as fake news delivered by presstitutes serves powerful private and governmental interests, how can we know the truth about anything?

For example, consider the claim found everywhere in US government and US media statements that the massive US trade deficit with China is the result of Chinese currency manipulation, keeping the yuan underpriced relative to the US dollar.

This false claim, which is widely accepted as truth even by Russian writers on Russian websites, is nonsense. China's currency is pegged to the US dollar. It moves with the dollar. China pegged its currency to the US dollar in order to create confidence in the Chinese currency. Over the past decade China has adjusted the peg of its currency to the dollar and permitted a rise in the value of the Chinese currency from 8.1 yuan to 6.9 yuan to the US dollar. (The yuan reached a strength of 6 to the dollar, but a rising dollar was pulling up the yuan, causing China to widen the float in order to avoid undue appreciation because of the US dollar's rise to other Asian and European currencies.) How is a rising yuan "currency manipulation"? Don't expect an answer from the presstitute financial media or the junk economists who comprise the neoliberal economics profession.

Round the back of Ramallah's main hospital lies the house of Iyad Haddad, a 52-year-old human rights investigator. His home office is the shopfront of a decrepit building and at first glance it looks like a bric-a-brac shop. But the objects placed out on the tables are not household trinkets. The surfaces are, in fact, cluttered with spent ammunition, tear gas canisters, sponge bullets and shell casings.

Haddad has spent the past three decades documenting the violence of the Israeli forces occupying his people's land. These ugly little pieces of memorabilia are his testament to that process.

Many of these weapons have been fired on peaceful demonstrators protesting against Israel's wall and settlements in the occupied West Bank. The villages of Nilin, Bilin and Nabi Saleh have been organizing regular protests for years. To my surprise, Haddad does not approve of those demonstrations.

"Sometimes they are using us so they can know how to use each kind of weapon," he said. "For me, these kinds of activities by the Palestinians become helpful to the Israelis because it makes this area into a laboratory to test their weapons, to develop them and make it a commercial industry in order to sell them to other countries."

Anyone seeking the true cause of the disaffection of Western electorates with the Western political elite need look no further than the case of the IMF's Director, Christine Lagarde.

Lagarde has just been convicted by a French court of negligence in a case involving the French businessman Bernard Tapie, to whom contrary to the advice of her officials she authorised a loan of 400 million euros of French taxpayers' money whilst she was France's Finance Minister, which has now been lost.

Notwithstanding the court's verdict of guilty - from which there is no appeal - Lagarde is not being punished and is keeping her job as Director of the IMF.

The court had the option of fining Lagarde 15,000 euros, or sending her to prison for a year, but it chose not to do either.

The IMF's Board, made up of the representatives of Finance Ministries from around the world but in practice heavily dominated by the Western powers, also decided to take no action against her.

Last month, the brutal four year battle for Aleppo ended, and the Syrian government began the enormous task of rebuilding the city. Toward the end of the battle for the city, much of the mainstream media spent so much time covering the 'fall' of Aleppo that they forgot what happens afterward: rebuilding, restoration, and most importantly, peace.

Sputnik has obtained footage of the effort now underway to rebuild the completely ruined eastern portions of the city, most of them held by militants for four years until the sudden and unexpected victory of government forces last month.

Residents are shown rebuilding their homes, while small factories (those that hadn't been disassembled, looted and taken across the border to Turkey) are shown humming once again, producing what appear to be textiles and other goods.

Syrian Prime Minister Imad Khamis said recently that restoring the city's industrial potential was one of the government's main priorities. Before the war, Aleppo was the largest city in the country, and a major regional industrial hub, producing textiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, and other goods. Aleppo accounted for over 50% of the country's manufacturing employment.

Over New Year's, I had two phone conversations with Norman Finkelstein about the historic UN Security Council Resolution 2334 of December 23, which labeled Israeli settlements a flagrant violation of international law. The transcript is slightly shortened.

Q. Tell me your thoughts on the resolution.

First of all, speaking strictly on the text of the resolution and not yet on its political resonance or import, it's a pretty good resolution and we should be clear about that. And textually I would count it as a victory. For the following reasons.

Number 1, the text begins by reaffirming explicitly the principle of "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force." That's an important fact for the following reason. When that statement was put into the preambular paragraph of UN resolution 242 in November 1967], Israel fought bitterly against including that principle, because it recognized that it preempts territorial revision, meaning Israel had to return every inch of territory acquired by force. Israel got a kind of compensation with the removal of the definite article the from territories later in the resolution [in the phrase, "Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from the territories occupied in the recent conflict"]. Israel managed to shift the whole debate for several decades, focusing exclusively on the deletion of the definite article. And it was the Arab states that always insisted that we have to also look at the preambular paragraph: the inadmissibility of territory.

The argument Israel made was that the preambular paragraph which referred to inadmissibility of territory acquired by force was not as significant as the operative paragraph ["withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories..."]. Well in this resolution, it says in accordance with international law, "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force," so it's a strong reaffirmation of that principle. It comes right at the head of the resolution. Interestingly, it's not even balanced as the original 242 is. 242 has two preambular statements. One of inadmissibility, the other was the right of states to live at peace with their neighbors. That was thrown in for Israel. They didn't mention it this time. They just mentioned the inadmissibility clause.

The Republican-controlled Congress opened the turbulent Trump era in Washington on Tuesday, as the new Senate moved instantly to begin the repeal of President Obama's signature health care law while the House descended into chaos in an ill-fated attempt to gut an independent congressional ethics office.

On a day usually reserved for pomp, constitutionally mandated procedure and small children parading around in fancy dresses, Congress instead pitched itself into partisan battles.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan easily won re-election, but not before the embarrassment of having his members defy him by voting to eliminate the ethics office, only to then abandon that effort after a flood of criticism from constituents and Twitter messages from President-elect Donald J. Trump that criticized House Republican priorities.

It was a rocky start to a period in which Republicans had promised an end to Washington gridlock if they controlled both Congress and the White House. There was intraparty conflict and a sense that Mr. Trump, who ran against the Republican establishment, would continue to be openly critical of his own party at times.

Russia's Ministry for Transportation does not consider a terrorist attack to be one of the versions that led to the crash of the Tu-154 passenger airliner of the Russian Defence Ministry in the Black Sea on December 25. For the time being, we know that the weather was fine, the pilots were experienced, and the aircraft was technically sound.

The crash of the Tu-154 over the Black Sea looks very much like the explosion of the Russian passenger jetliner over Sinai Peninsula, when the Federal Security Bureau made an official announcement about the terrorist attack only two weeks after the crash. There is another version - of radio-electronic attack.

Black boxes may not give an answer to the question of whether there was a terrorist attack on board the Tu-154. This has already been the case in the investigation of the Sinai plane crash, before specialists found traces of two-component explosives in a can of Coke, hidden in a seat pocket. The explosion caused the plane to collapse in midair. This explained the reason why the fragments of the aircraft were scattered on a large territory, FSB Director Bortnikov then said.

President-elect Donald Trump will begin immediately to undo some of President Barack Obama's executive orders, Vice President-elect Mike Pence said on Wednesday. "Before the end of the [inauguration] day we do anticipate that the president-elect will be in the Oval Office to both repeal executive orders and set in policies to implement promises he made," Pence told reporters.

Pence said that Trump's first priority when he takes office later this month is to replace the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. "But the first order of business is to repeal and replace Obamacare," Pence said. US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said Republicans would take action beginning on Wednesday to replace Obamacare.

On Tuesday, Congressman Mike Enzi, chairman of the US Senate Budget Committee, introduced a resolution to fast-track the repeal of Obamacare and its replacement with a new program. Trump's spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway said on Tuesday that she believes Obamacare does have some merits, including coverage for preexisting medical conditions. Congressional Republicans have made the repeal of the Affordable Care Act a priority since it was first passed in 2011.

Rupert Murdoch's flagship tabloid has warned against letting a mean millionaire control press regulation, after ex-motorsport boss Max Mosley donated £4 million ($4.9 million) to Impress - a regulatory body set up in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry. Murdoch newspapers like The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World were savaged in the inquiry into press culture and behavior.

Mosley was among a number of public figures who campaigned against the Murdoch press during the inquiry. The Sun had previously published a story about Mosley attending a Nazi-themed sex party. "NO democracy should tolerate the idea of centuries of press freedom being left in the hands of a vindictive tycoon," the editorial said.

Citing a poll run by the paper itself, The Sun then warned that the state had effectively endorsed Impress "despite being bankrolled by odious millionaire Max Mosley and supported by just four percent of Brits. "It beggars belief that newspapers who refuse to submit to Mosley's organization, staffed by zealots who hate the tabloids, will be clobbered by a law that would force them to pay crippling legal costs on libel actions even if they won." The paper said that most publications were already members of the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO), which it described as a "self-funded, properly independent regulator, with an arbitration service that ensures justice can be served without threatening the future of investigative journalism."

The Sun warned that Mosley and other "washed-up celebs and politicians" would do "anything to shut down papers that expose the wrongdoings of the rich and famous."