US President-elect Donald Trump stepped up his criticism of the UN after a resolution condemning Israel over West Bank settlements passed in the Security Council, with the US abstaining. Trump, who takes office in three weeks, called for a veto.


The UN has "such great potential" but is currently just "a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time," Trump pronounced on Sunday via Twitter.

Adopted on Friday, Resolution 2334 declared Israeli settlements in "Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, including East-Jerusalem" to be a "flagrant violation" of international law.

The end of the year is approaching, and data concerning government abuses of power has begun pouring in.

According to Facebook's Global Government Requests Report, government's requests for Facebook account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016.

Facebook's official announcement explained that requests for user data went from 46,710 in the last half of 2015 to 59,229 in the first half of 2016. At least 56 percent of these requests, Facebook added, "contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user."

Law enforcement agencies from across the globe, Facebook continued, often send restriction requests demanding Facebook remove content from its forums. Fortunately, these requests dropped substantially this year, from 55,827 in the last half of 2015 to 9,663 in 2016 — an 87 percent drop. Most of the 2015 requests revolved around "French content restrictions of a single image from the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks."

Additionally, Facebook used its report to disclose for the first time what the company does when law enforcement agencies request "snapshots" of a user account that might be relevant to law enforcement for undisclosed reasons.

Undeterred by a resounding defeat at the United Nations, Israel's government said Monday that it would move ahead with thousands of new homes in East Jerusalem and warned nations against further action, declaring that Israel does not "turn the other cheek."

Just a few days after the United Nations Security Council voted to condemn Israeli settlements, Jerusalem's municipal government signaled that it would not back down: The city intends to approve 600 housing units in the predominantly Palestinian eastern section of town on Wednesday in what a top official called a first installment on 5,600 new homes.

The defiant posture reflected a bristling anger among Israel's pro-settlement political leaders, who not only blamed the United States for failing to block the Council resolution, but also claimed to have secret intelligence showing that President Obama's team had orchestrated it. American officials strongly denied the claim, but the sides seem poised for more weeks of conflict until Mr. Obama hands over the presidency to Donald J. Trump.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lashed out at Security Council countries by curbing diplomatic contacts, recalling envoys, cutting off aid and summoning the American ambassador for a scolding. He canceled a planned visit this week by Ukraine's prime minister even as he expressed concern on Monday that Mr. Obama was planning more action at the United Nations before his term ends next month.

The prime minister defended his retaliation. "Israel is a country with national pride, and we do not turn the other cheek," he said. "This is a responsible, measured and vigorous response, the natural response of a healthy people that is making it clear to the nations of the world that what was done at the U.N. is unacceptable to us."

Israel continues to respond to the UN Security Council resolution demanding it stop building settlements in occupied Palestinian territories with a mix of defiance and conciliation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he's formulating a plan to retaliate against the UN at a December 25 Cabinet meeting — but he also apparently instructed his party's lawmakers to tone down their settlement rhetoric until US President-elect Donald Trump takes office next month.

On the other hand, other sources say the UN resolution is causing pro-settlement factions in Israel to push even further, bringing up a vote on a deeply controversial bill to officially legalize a number of outposts. "We will do all it takes so Israel emerges unscathed from this shameful decision," Netanyahu told his Cabinet, AP reports. He said he had asked the Foreign Ministry to prepare a "plan of action" against the UN, but offered no more details.

Netanyahu has accused US President Barack Obama of secretly working with Israel's enemies to allow the vote to take place. The US abstained from the resolution but did not veto it, as it has similar resolutions in the past.


"Israel looks forward to working with President-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution," Netanyahu said in a statement after the resolution.

This unaccountable oligarchy of spies controls the information that guides our military and civilian leaders. The recent integration of two military contractors into a $10 billion behemoth is the latest in a wave of mergers and acquisitions that have transformed America's privatized, high-tech intelligence system into what looks like an old-fashioned monopoly.

In August, Leidos Holdings, a major contractor for the Pentagon and the National Security Agency, completed a long-planned merger with the Information Systems & Global Solutions division of Lockheed Martin, the global military giant. The 8,000 operatives employed by the new company do everything from analyzing signals for the NSA to tracking down suspected enemy fighters for US Special Forces in the Middle East and Africa.

The sheer size of the new entity makes Leidos one of the most powerful companies in the intelligence-contracting industry, which is worth about $50 billion today. According to a comprehensive study I've just completed on public and private employment in intelligence, Leidos is now the largest of five corporations that together employ nearly 80 percent of the private-sector employees contracted to work for US spy and surveillance agencies.

Yes, that's 80 percent. For the first time since spy agencies began outsourcing their core analytic and operational work in the late 1990s, the bulk of the contracted work goes to a handful of companies: Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, CSRA, SAIC, and CACI International. This concentration of "pure plays"—a Wall Street term for companies that makes one product for a single market—marks a fundamental shift in an industry that was once a highly diverse mix of large military contractors, small and medium technology companies, and tiny "Beltway Bandits" surrounding Washington, D.C.

A quarter of a century ago, on the night of December 25, 1991, the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin cupola - and the USSR was no more. Arguably what President Putin later described, in 2005, as "the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" doubled as the most comprehensive fall of an empire in modern history.

Way beyond the historical archives of Marxism-Leninism suddenly being besieged by graphic, glitzy signs of conspicuous consumption, what developed on a personal level was a "real drama" (again, Putin's words) of millions of Russians suddenly thrown out of the federation, dispersed among 12 new republics scattered across Eurasia.

The world went unipolar in a flash; one form of totalitarianism disappeared to the profit of another, supported by two key pillars; NATO, propelled to the role of global Robocop, and the exorbitant privilege of printing the US dollar as a fiat currency. Breathless neo-Hegelian functionaries of Empire hastily proclaimed the end of History. To widespread neocon glee, that seemed to erase the 1987 verdict of Yale historian Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, who stressed that the global American empire, like all empires that came before, was declining.

Everyone remembers December 25, 1991. Please allow me a brief personal interlude. On that fateful winter night, I was by the Ganges, in Varanasi, immersed in more spiritual matters. Being on the road non-stop, across Southeast Asia, and then in India, Nepal and booming China, way before the 24/7 instant com era, I only grasped the enormity of what had happened after I boarded the Transiberian from Beijing and arrived in USSR-deprived Moscow over two months after the fact. It was that trip that made me leave the West to learn Asia from the inside, and follow what I would later characterize as The Eurasian Century.

It is doubtful the Japanese government will apologize to the US for Pearl Harbor, particularly after Obama offered no apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, says Richard Becker, anti-war activist from the ANSWER Coalition. Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is scheduled to arrive in Hawaii this week for a two-day visit to commemorate the victims of Pearl Harbor and promote peace.

He will become the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor and attend the memorial there. But Abe won't be apologizing for the attack on the US naval base on December 7, 1941, an act that pulled the United States into World War II.

Abe's visit will come just a few months after Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to officially visit a Hiroshima memorial in Japan. While visiting Hiroshima, Obama paid respects to the victims who perished after the US dropped an atomic bomb on the industrial city on August 6, 1945 (followed three days later with another bombing of Nagasaki), but did not apologize for the attack.

Despite fears about the many negatives from a Donald Trump presidency, one positive could be his shattering of the monopoly that neocons and liberal hawks now hold over U.S. foreign policy.

Americans and the world have valid reasons to worry about Donald Trump's presidency, given his lack of experience and his refusal to recognize that his loss of the popular vote should moderate his emerging domestic policies. But Trump also could do some good things.

Particularly, Trump could break the death grip that neoconservatives and their "liberal interventionist" tag-team partners now have locked around the throat of U.S. foreign policy. Trump owes little to these "regime change" advocates since nearly all of them supported either other Republicans or his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. And the few who backed Trump, such as John Bolton and James Woolsey, have been largely passed over as Trump assembles his foreign policy and national security teams by relying mostly on a combination of outsiders and outcasts.

The latest example of "fake news" is the wild misrepresentation of a message from the Republican National Committee that caused a Christmas day frenzy as the establishment media and bitter online leftists pushed the theory that a reference to a "new King" in a paragraph talking about Jesus was an allusion to Donald Trump.

The RNC Message Celebrating Christmas began:WASHINGTON - Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus and Co-Chair Sharon Day released the following statement celebrating Christmas:

"Merry Christmas to all! Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.

RNC Communications Director Sean Spicer called out both CNN and BuzzFeed on Twitter for hyping the bizarre interpretations of the Christmas message. CNN posted a story titled "RNC: The 'new King' is not Trump," while BuzzFeed's article "People Are Arguing About Whether Republicans Just Compared Trump To Jesus" stated:

The combination of the words "this Christmas" and "new King" had people wondering whether the GOP was comparing Donald Trump to, well, Jesus.

Spicer, who is slated to be the Press Secretary for the Trump administration, wasted no time in not only stating the obvious fact that "the King" is a reference to Jesus Christ but to call on both CNN and BuzzFeed to apologize.

After any great victory, such as the one achieved by Donald Trump in November, it is natural and important to celebrate it. However, it is equally important to ensure that the euphoria of victory does not inhibit one's critical facilities. After all, viewing the world as one would like it to be, as opposed to how it actually is, is an ancient folly, a folly to which we will find ourselves all too susceptible to if we do not vigilantly guard against it.

It appears however that it is just this folly, the folly of wishful thinking, which Professor Alexander Dugin (among others) has fallen into in his recent post-election piece on Donald Trump's victory that:

Trump's victory shows that there are two Americas today, or rather, two versions of the United States: Clinton's America and Trump's America. Trump's America is traditional and conservative, healthy, and worthy of respect. This America said a resounding "no" to globalism and the expansion of liberal ideology. This is the real America, the America of realism which has chosen its president and not succumbed to the false propaganda of the globalist liberal media.

Of course, in a sense, Dugin is right here, that, there are in fact "two versions of the United States" the U.S. of Clinton and the U.S. of Trump. Undoubtedly, these two versions are incompatible with one another, either one or the other must win the contest for power, and only one can claim to be the "real" America. Dugin asserts that it is Trump's America that is the "real" America and it is here the that the problem with his analysis lies.