The makeup of hydraulic fracturing fluid - the slurry of chemicals, sand and water injected deep underground to free petroleum deposits trapped by bedrock - is a closely guarded secret of the oil and gas industry.

Fracking has contaminated drinking water and is linked to health problems in people living near drilling sites, and also to triggering earthquakes. But federal law doesn't require drillers to disclose what's in their fracking fluid. Although some states have disclosure laws - California's is the most comprehensive - most still allow some form of "trade secret" protection and don't require the generation, submission or publication of health and safety data.

Western reporters aghast at scale of Russian military presence in Syria.

A little known fact about the Palmyra concert is that the Russians arranged for 150 western journalists to attend it. The Western reporters who attended the concert seem however to have been uninterested in it.

This report from CNN's Frederik Pleitgen does not mention it at all.

Instead the Western reporters whom the Russians took to Palmyra seem to have been more interested in reporting on the scale of the Russian military operation in Syria.

The Russians must find this deeply frustrating. However for those of us interested in the nature of the Russian military operation in Syria it does at least provide an insight into what is going on.

The first thing that comes across from Western reporters' accounts of their visit to Syria is their barely concealed awe at the professionalism and high motivation of the Russian troops they saw there. They were clearly impressed by the fitness and discipline of the troops, the high level of organisation, the general appearance of cleanliness and good order, and the efficient supply chain.

Despite a military budget of nearly $600 billion, many US aircraft can't even get off the ground

An investigation by FOX News has revealed the deplorable state of the US Air Force. A visit to Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota revealed that of 20 B-1 bombers stationed there, only 9 were airworthy.

Airmen reported being overworked and overdeployed due to a shortage of personnel. The investigation also found that an F-16 squadron in South Carolina was lacking 41 parts for its aircraft.

Capt. Travis Lytton of the 28th Maintenance Squadron said that the Air Force was currently cannibalizing jets in museums in order to keep its planes in the air.

The people behind the scenes of today's world crises could not have succeeded in reshaping so many nations without help. Creating a robotic billionaire monster like George Soros, and unleashing him on the former Soviet republics, it could never have led to so much turmoil. There have to be more adjutants, armies of them in fact, in order to reshape the world's image. Today I will focus on Swedish politician, Carl Bildt is but one of a brigade of "pliable" lieutenants in the new world order scheme of things. By the end of this report the reader will better understand why so many fear Hillary Clinton, and why many in the UK desire an exit from the EU.

Carl Bildt's Wikipedia page says he is "notable internationally, as a mediator of the Yugoslav Wars". But I think the Wikipedia editors should amend the word "notable", and replace it with "notorious". Maybe I will do that myself, after writing this report. Bildt, who was instrumental in helping slice up Yugoslavia into management chunks, took part in something known as the Dayton Peace Agreement, where the ground rules for so-called peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The former Swedish Prime Minister later served as the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Balkans, the perfect position for sewing up the former Yugoslavia into a tight little bundle of mini-states beholding to the US, Britain, and NATO. The effect these henchmen have in our world can best be seen in this paragraph from the DC World Affairs blog on the fate of Bosnia after Bilt and Dayton:

"With the constitution, police, central bank, refugees and "human rights" in the hands of foreign officials for the rest of the century, it is difficult to describe Bosnia and Herzegovina as a "state" in any meaningful sense. It has been turned into an international protectorate at best, or a laboratory for political and social experimentation at worst."

Experimentation is what Soros' Open Society Foundations and US government agencies like USAID have been at play at since before the Soviet Union dissolved. It turns out the USSR, the "Evil Empire" of US President Ronald Reagan, was a lesser evil than the hegemonic monster we see rampaging today.

With a focus on Mr. Bildt's involvement in the Yugoslavian debacle, we see how this eventually led to his role in what's known as the EU Eastern Partnership, from whence a takeover of all the republics surrounding Russia could be facilitated. Discovery on Carl Bildt need only go so far as his involvements in a now suspect EU, and early endeavors with the Young European Federalists back in the early 1970s. This movement, revealed as a strategic tool for none other than Gen William "Wild Bill" Donovan, and the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA, paints the Swedish politician vividly. Declassified documents presented by The Telegraph in this piece, they show linkages in between not only the US Government and key business entities, but the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and key politicians and regulators in the UK. It's an untidy secret that the European Union is, in fact, a creation of those who control the CIA, and Bildt is another whipping boy for those string pullers too.

Hidden microphones that are part of a clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the Bay Area has been exposed.

Imagine standing at a bus stop, talking to your friend and having your conversation recorded without you knowing. It happens all the time, and the FBI doesn't even need a warrant to do it.

Federal agents are planting microphones to secretly record conversations.

Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent said, "They put microphones under rocks, they put microphones in trees, they plant microphones in equipment. I mean, there's microphones that are planted in places that people don't think about, because that's the intent!"

FBI agents hid microphones inside light fixtures and at a bus stop outside the Oakland Courthouse without a warrant to record conversations, between March 2010 and January 2011.

Thousands of ISIS associates have been routinely crossing into Syria aided by contacts in Turkey, phone calls tapped by Ankara security forces and handed to the media by opposition MP Erem Erdem reveal. He accuses the government of a massive cover-up.

Transcribed phone recordings belonging to Ilhami Bali, well known in Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) ranks and suspected of staging high-profile bomb attacks in Ankara and the mainly-Kurdish border city of Suruc, detail the lack of control along the Syrian Turkish border. The 98-kilometer (61-mile) stretch of border has only two crossings, the Jarablus and Al Rai entry points across from Turkey's Gaziantep and Kilis.

Pressured by the international community to impose stricter border controls to stem the flood of militants into Syria, Ankara has been erecting walls at key crossing points, but to no avail as surveillance data from the Municipality of Ankara Provincial Security Department revealed.

Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America's battle for world domination in the 21^st century.

If not stopped, it will be a short century.

Since 1945, America's Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World's Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth's people. In the 19^th century, America exterminated another kind of "red menace," writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps ("Indian reservations"), in the name of civilizing the "savages." By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism - was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.

American external imperialism was born.

Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler's war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.

Michel Temer, the vice president and former political ally of ousted Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) President Dilma Rousseff, formally took control of Planalto, the presidential offices in Brasilia, Thursday, declaring that his would be a government of "national salvation," and assembling a cabinet of right-wing politicians and capitalist economists from the banking and financial sector.

With the Brazilian Senate having voted that morning after an all-night session to initiate impeachment proceedings against Rousseff, she was suspended from office for the length of a trial that will likely run into September or October. While only a simple majority vote was required to begin this process, the lopsided result was 55 to 22, more than the two-thirds majority that is ultimately required to permanently remove the PT president from office. Given that the basis of the impeachment charges—Rousseff's alleged manipulation of budgetary accounts to cover for temporary shortfalls—was clearly contrived as a pretext, a final conviction appears inevitable.

Brazil is the largest country in Latin America and the seventh largest economy in the world. Rousseff received 54 million votes in 2014 when she was reelected to a second term as president. This election has now been overturned through an anti-democratic political conspiracy at the highest level of the Brazilian ruling elite.

A court in Ivano-Frankivsk, western Ukraine today sentenced journalist Ruslan Kotsaba to three and a half years in prison on May 11. His sentencing occurred the following day.

He was convicted under article 114-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, namely, hindering the activities of Ukrainian Armed Forces and other military forces. Prior to his arrest in February 2015, he called on Ukrainian men of military age to defy compulsory military draft and refuse to serve in the civil war zone of eastern Ukraine. He posted a video to the internet saying, "I would prefer to go to prison than to take part in this fratricidal war."

Are humans schizophrenic? This is a serious question. In general terms, a schizophrenic is defined as someone who engages in abnormal social behavior and fails to understand reality. You could argue that those two criteria are more or less the same, or at least that one leads to the other. If you fail to grasp reality, you can't have normal social interactions, and if your interactions with others are faulty, there's something you're missing when it comes to understanding the reality around you.

But 'failure to understand reality', now that one really describes the average human being (and in particular some of the above average ones). Granted, there are degrees of such faulty comprehension, and true schizophrenics are obviously on the extreme end of the spectrum, but it's all the same condition. So it's not surprising that a more rational and objective analysis of schizophrenia defines it as social illness rather than strictly genetic or physical, i.e. it is the result of the toxic influence of our wonderful, modern social mores and 'norms' on a person's mind, body and soul. Schizophrenics may be extreme cases, but we're all affected.

Is there any essential difference between a schizophrenic who believes something because voices told them to, and an entire nation of people believing that the US invaded Iraq to bring freedom and democracy because their government told them to? In both cases, the person/people are being manipulated by a bogus, manipulative authority. The only important distinction I can think of is that in the first case a single person's life is negatively affected, in the second, millions of lives are not only negatively affected, but destroyed.

So I'd argue that everyone is 'schizophrenic' to one degree or another, and anyone who disagrees should go see a shrink. But a specific example of people's maladaptation to truth or reality was brought to my attention when reading a story on RT.com about a wonderful recent event at Kruger national park: a lion ate a buffalo. Not impressed? Well the 'highlight' of this event for observers (and half the internet) is the fact that the lion tore open the (female) buffalo's stomach and pulled out its unborn fetus and carried it off to a few other lions who all ate it.

As it burrows its head in the bloody cavities of the dead animal it can be seen pulling out a fleshy object.

'What is it?' the man watching wonders, 'It looks like a bit of stomach.'

Then suddenly, as the big cat makes off with its find, the woman gasps in shock, 'It's a baby!' she cries.

'That was pregnant, it got the baby out,' she says in disgust, 'Oh my goodness, gross.'