Nothing could be more symbolic of the decline of Europe and the rise of Eurasia than the construction of a modern railway from the Ethiopian capitol of Addis Ababa to a port on the Red Sea in Djibouti. The Rail line is being built by Chinese Civil Engineering Construction Corporation and China Railway Group (CREC). It replaces an old delapidated rail line built by the French during the period of European colonization of Africa at the end of the 19th Century.

What, where, when...

The Chinese rail company is going to make the entirely new 656-kilometer electric rail line from the Ethiopian capitol of Addis Ababa to the Red Sea Port of Djibouti fully operational at most any moment now. The project will create 5,000 local jobs, and allow Ethiopia to boost exports of key commodities such as coffee and sesame. It also offers the opportunity to get Ethiopian workers trained by engineers from the Chinese Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. To date 250 Ethiopian students have been trained in China in the railway sector, a good address as China today is the world's leading builder of railways.

It will cost $1.2 billion with the Export-Import Bank of China financing 70 per cent and the Ethiopian government 30 per cent. It will be one of the first electric trains in East Africa, with a speed of 120 kilometres an hour. It will reportedly be easier and cheaper to maintain than the former French diesel locomotives, the last of which shut down in 2008, as it will be mechanised, relying on locally-produced hydropower to run.

Hillary Clinton is campaigning to make the White House her next home, but she could find herself in "different government housing" if Ted Cruz is elected president. The Republican hinted that he would throw Clinton behind bars over her email scandal.

Speaking at a rally in Irvine, California, on Monday, Cruz said: "I've got slightly different government housing in mind for her."

Although Cruz did not elaborate on the comment, it is most likely in reference to the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while acting as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

It remains unclear just how serious Cruz was when he made the statement. However, his supporters responded to the comment with cheers and applause.

Although Washington is using the so-called Panama Papers to wage a propaganda war against politicians it despises, especially in Russia and China, this operation has recently come to a screeching halt due to the lack of convincing evidence in those papers. So what we are witnessing now is simple allegations that the political elites of the two above mentioned countries are engaged in some inappropriate financial activities.

However, this recent information attack has already backfired against Washington itself along with its closest allies. For instance, we've learnt from these papers that London is most probably the global capital of money-laundering. The responsibilities of Mossack Fonseca were reduced to purely technical functions while the actual transfer and concealment of money was carried out by a number of banks and law firms. The Times would note in one of its articles:

Almost 2,000 British middlemen helped to create a network of offshore companies and move billions of pounds secretly around the world, according to the Panama papers. Lawyers, accountants, banks and company formation agents based in Britain were involved in setting up 32,000 of the 200,000 offshore companies incorporated by Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm.

Furthermore, as it follows from yet another publication of The Times for over 16 years, thousands of offshore companies that own property in Great Britain were providing the addresses of the largest UK largest law firms in the City like Clifford Chance, Farrer & Co and Withers as their own. For instance, a British banker Nigel Cowie, who resided in North Korea for over two decades, created an offshore finance company that was allegedly used by the Pyongyang regime for arms trade and be able to carry on developing its nuclear program, says The Guardian. According to the released documents, Nigel Cowie was behind a Pyongyang front company, DCB Finance Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Richard C. Cook thinks that Bernie Sanders could become the next president.

But could Sanders make any difference?

Obama's regime was totally different than his campaign messages, just as George W. Bush's regime was different from his campaign messages. The neoconservatives created the specter of terrorism and successfully used it to create a warfare/police state. The One Percent rakes in the billions of dollars from US financial and military hegemony. These formidable private powers also own Congress.

Any president who tried to redress the power imbalance would likely find himself outgunned.

Americans have a history of being easily manipulated and brainwashed, but a couple of decades of economic disappointment is finally producing some dissatisfaction. Mike Whitney explains Donald Trump's popularity with voters:

"The point we're trying to make is that Donald Trump's meteoric rise in the GOP can be traced back to the failed economic policies of prior administrations. He's the political beneficiary of 3 decades of stagnant wages, falling incomes, declining living standards, and a cataclysmic financial crisis that wiped out trillions of dollars in home equity leaving behind a battered middle class and sluggish economy that doesn't grow, doesn't generate opportunities for upward mobility, and only produces low-paying, deadend, service-sector jobs that barely pay the rent."

You have heard me say the same thing many times.

Some Americans are waking up. As the hardships they suffer intensify, perhaps a movement will arise that can force through changes. However, as former president Jimmy Carter says, America is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy. Elections are manipulated in order to strengthen the oligarchy. As the electorate has no presence in Washington, violence is emerging as the only possible method of change.

On Monday, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the target of the first nuclear bomb ever used in wartime. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city, killing between 70,000 and 146,000 civilians outright. Three days later, on August 9, the US dropped a second nuclear bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing a further 39,000 to 80,000 civilians.

The Obama administration made clear that Kerry, the highest-ranking US official ever to visit the city, was not coming to apologize for these terrible crimes.

"There is no effort...to seek an apology from the United States, nor is there any interest in reopening the question of blame for the sequence of events that culminated in the use of the atomic bomb,"

the State Department said Monday.

Declaring that "the peaceful, stable international system that we have built in the decades since World War II are not a given," Kerry said the bombing of Hiroshima "reminds everybody of the extraordinary complexity of choices in war and of what war does to people, to communities, to countries, to the world." He did not seek to reconcile this hypocritical statement with the fact that he is a representative of the state responsible for the crime.

Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, so you might think he'd be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. But today, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is shaking political regimes around the world.

"The CIA I'm sure is behind this, in my opinion," Birkenfeld said.

- From the CNBC article: Swiss Banker Whistleblower: CIA Behind Panama Papers

Last Friday, I published a post titled, Was the Panama Papers "Leak" a Russian Intelligence Operation? Here's some of what I wrote:

The United States is a major backer and supporter of the Saudi-led war against Yemen. The U.S. supplies the weapons, and provides most of the targeting and military tactics. See this, this, this, this, this and this. (And see this for background on the Yemen war.)

The Saudi and American military are committing war crimes left and right ...

For example, a report from the United Nations Children's Fund notes:

Attacks on schools and hospitals and the denial of humanitarian assistance to children continue to occur. The UN verified 51 attacks on education facilities, including schools and personnel.

The story of Putin's fabled billions is a case study of something which people passionately believe in independently of any facts. As often happens in such cases, those who believe in that thing then hunt around for facts to prove it true. Every so often they come up with facts they claim proves it true. On careful examination however it turns out they do nothing of the sort. When that is pointed out to the true believers it does not change their belief that what they believe is true. Instead they retreat into denial and set off hunting for new facts.

In my opinion none of the claims about Putin's billionaire fortune are true and some of them are demonstrably false. In this article I will try to explain why. I will also try to show how the various claims about Putin's billions follow certain recurring patterns, which in themselves give reasons to doubt they are true. Lastly I will give my own opinion about how rich Putin actually is and why he is almost certainly not even a rich man. In order to do this I will deal with the various allegations which have been made about Putin in turn in rough chronological order ending with the so-called Panama Papers.

Last week truepublica reported that four months ago, Google created a new holding company called Alphabet and that Eric Schmidt, the new Executive Chairman of Alphabet, and therefore Google, had decided to accept the offer of leading the Pentagon advisory board with a view to "bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the US military."

We questioned the ethics and moral judgement of both Schmidt and Google in joining forces with the biggest killing machine in modern times, certainly since the world wars.

We pointed to the meeting between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange back in 2011, supposedly organised to discuss a book Schmidt was writing who was unexpectedly accompanied by a Jared Cohen. Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a slick ideas guy at two U.S. administrations, known to be something of a courtier from the world of policy think tanks sympathetic to US foreign policy. He was a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. Newsweek reported that:

"It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a "think/do tank" based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born."

Assange asserts that Schmidt was acting directly on behalf of Washington with a documented relationship that put him close to President Obama and Clinton and as Assange puts it: "Cohen's directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and "corporate responsibility" work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google's "director of regime change."

Russian engineers have cleared around 180 hectares (about two square kilometers) in the ancient city of Palmyra, defusing some 3,000 bombs, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday.

"Beginning April 1, over 30 kilometers of roads and more than 182 hectares of land have been demined; 2,987 explosive objects have been unearthed," Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said at a teleconference at the National Defense Control Center.