On Saturday, the Saudi Arabian government beheaded 47 people, one of whom was prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a senior opposition figure. He and the others were all killed for their charges of "undermining the national security" of the kingdom.

Immediately following the beheadings, countries across the globe - except for the United States - denounced the barbaric move.

Rightfully outraged with the beheadings, Shiite Muslims in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain angrily condemned the executions, and Iranian protesters stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran.

These inhumane acts of murder on the part of the Saudis have forced the hands of those who sell them weapons and on Monday, Germany became the first country to question their arms trade deal.

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." — Aldous Huxley

There's a man who contacts me several times a week to disagree with my assessments of the American police state. According to this self-avowed Pollyanna who is tired of hearing "bad news," the country is doing just fine, the government's intentions are honorable, anyone in authority should be blindly obeyed, those individuals who are being arrested, shot and imprisoned must have done something to deserve such treatment, and if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't care whether the government is spying on you.

In other words, this man trusts the government with his life, his loved ones and his property, and anyone who doesn't feel the same should move elsewhere.

It's tempting to write this man off as dangerously deluded, treacherously naïve, and clueless to the point of civic incompetence. However, he is not alone in his goose-stepping, comfort-loving, TV-watching, insulated-from-reality devotion to the alternate universe constructed for us by the Corporate State with its government propaganda, pseudo-patriotism and contrived political divisions.

While only 1 in 5 Americans claim to trust the government to do what is right, the majority of the people are not quite ready to ditch the American experiment in liberty. Or at least they're not quite ready to ditch the government with which they have been saddled.

As The Washington Post concludes, "Americans hate government, but they like what it does." Indeed, kvetching aside, Americans want the government to keep providing institutionalized comforts such as Social Security, public schools, and unemployment benefits, fighting alleged terrorists and illegal immigrants, defending the nation from domestic and foreign threats, and maintaining the national infrastructure. And it doesn't matter that the government has shown itself to be corrupt, abusive, hostile to citizens who disagree, wasteful and unconcerned about the plight of the average American.

For the moment, Americans are continuing to play by the government's rules. Indeed, Americans may not approve the jobs being done by their elected leaders, and they may have little to no access to those same representatives, but they remain committed to the political process, so much so that they are working themselves into a frenzy over the upcoming presidential election, with contributions to the various candidates nearing $500 million.

Yet as Barack Obama's tenure in the White House shows, no matter how much hope and change were promised, what we've ended up with is not only more of the same, but something worse: an invasive, authoritarian surveillance state armed and ready to eliminate any opposition.

The state of our nation under Obama has become more bureaucratic, more debt-ridden, more violent, more militarized, more fascist, more lawless, more invasive, more corrupt, more untrustworthy, more mired in war, and more unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the electorate. Most of all, the government, already diabolical and manipulative to the nth degree, has mastered the art of "do what I say and not what I do" hypocrisy.

Russian military aircraft hit 1097 terrorists targets in Syria and conducted 311 sorties since the beginning of 2016, the Russian General Staff announced.

Russian combat aircraft carried out over 300 missions in Syria since the beginning of 2016, hitting about 1,100 terrorist targets in ten provinces, the Russian General Staff said Monday.

Terrorist groups operating in Syria continue to receive reinforcements coming through Turkey, despite all efforts by the global community the Russian General Staff announced.

"Russian jets are striking the terrorists' strongholds in Syria. We have conducted 311 sorties and destroyed at least 1,097 targets in the provinces of Aleppo, Latakia, Homs, Damascus, Deir-er-Zor, Hasakah, Daraa and Raqqa," Rudskoy said.

The UK government has been warned with legal action over its sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, with legal experts accusing Britain of being in breach of national, EU and international law by supplying British-made weapons and military equipment to the Gulf kingdom.

Lawyers acting on behalf of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) have stepped up legal proceedings against the government, accusing officials in London of failing in its legal duty to prevent and condemn breaches of international humanitarian law.

In a legal letter, CAAT experts warned that a failure to halt current arms export contracts to Saudi Arabia, along with the decision to continue granting new export licenses for weapons, is unlawful, as the weapons could be used in the Saudi-led coalition's military campaign in Yemen.

Pondering Riyadh's decision to execute prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, which resulted in a political and diplomatic firestorm threatening to burn out of control, Syrian journalist Abbas Juma wonders whether the Saudis could have been duped into such a reckless move, whose consequences could include the collapse of the kingdom.

On January 2, Saudi Arabia executed prominent Shiite cleric and political activist Nimr al-Nimr, sparking outrage among Shiites around the world, including in Iran, where Shia Islam predominates. The execution resulted in protesters in Tehran storming the Saudi Embassy, Riyadh and its allies breaking off diplomatic relations with Iran, and Saudi warplanes bombing the Iranian Embassy in Yemen.

Commenting on Riyadh's possible rationale in an op-ed for independent Russian newspaper Svobodnaya Pressa, Syrian journalist Abbas Juma suggested that, first things first, analysts from all sides knew that Nimr's death would result in a crisis. "Therefore, few could believe that Riyadh would take such a step."

The fall of the Berlin Wall and USSR did not unite Europe, but only moved the division line eastwards. The West still declares Russia an enemy each time that Moscow takes an independent stance and asserts its national interests, President Putin told Bild. "We did everything wrong from the outset," Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with German newspaper Bild. "We did not overcome Europe's division: Twenty-five years ago the Berlin Wall fell, but Europe's division was not overcome, invisible walls simply moved to the East. This created the foundation for mutual reproaches, misunderstanding, and crises in the future."

Russia's most crucial mistake during these years was a failure to clearly declare and actively protect national interests from day one, Putin said. "We have failed to assert our national interests, while we should have done that from the outset. Then the whole world could have been more balanced," Putin said. German politicians had foreseen that antagonism between Cold War opponents would only grow unless the format of international relations and balance of power in Europe changed radically, the Russian President said, citing archived records of talks which took place between German and Soviet diplomats at the time.

The "patriarch of European politics" at the time, German diplomat Egon Karl-Heinz Bahr said on June 26, 1990: "If while uniting Germany we do not take decisive steps to overcome the division of Europe into hostile blocs, the developments can take such an unfavorable turn that the USSR will be doomed to international isolation." The whole of central Europe, either with East Germany or without it, according to Bahr's concrete proposals, should have formed a separate alliance with the participation of both the Soviet Union and the US, Putin said.

Things are getting nailed down in the case of thousands of war crimes committed by neo-Nazi reprisal battalions -- or by the Ukrainian army that is plaguing the Donbass and also the territory itself of Kievan Ukraine.

So far the first series of 800 war crimes dossiers have been filed to the European Court of Human Rights, and 1500 others are awaiting deposit. Lawyers of Lugansk and Donetsk are still at it, hard at work gathering testimony, because the crimes continue and survivors of the Ukrainian prisons or escapees flood month after month to the Donbass or appear in other parts of the world sometimes after long and very dangerous journeys, journeys to escape the clutches of the political police of Kiev.

But the noose tightens tirelessly. In addition to the issues that come together and will be filed in the competent courts, about 12 000 cases of elderly people who, in the depth of winter, had been deprived of their pensions by Kiev and left in danger of death are already collected and will be joined by several thousands more. This decision, putting lives of the vulnerable citizens at risk, contravenes international law. Taken by Kiev, it should cost them dearly and it will not be forgotten in the future courts that will rule on Ukrainian war criminals at all levels of the state apparatus where they are found.

Passenger records handed over to the Guardian by Kurdish forces at Tel Abyad have Daesh stamp marks.

In what appears to be additional confirmation of Turkey's leadership knowledge of Daesh (also known as the Islamic State terrorist group), crossing Syria-Turkey borders without challenge, Kurdish forces managed to seize a list of passengers crossing through Tel Abyad, a town in northern Syria located around 2 kilometers from the Turkish border.

Numerous Daesh-sponsored buses used to pass through the town Tel Abyad bordering with Turkey until June 2015 when Kurdish forces took control of the town.

For four months in a row since December 2014, passengers with registered ID numbers, names, and other personal data stamped by Daesh "department of immigration" and "department of transport" came to Tel Abyad from within Daesh-held territory.

US and international media have been abuzz in recent days with the ongoing armed occupation at the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. The social media space has been - quite predictably - polarized, with many on the far-right lionizing the armed occupiers as "patriots" and "heroes" defending a just cause in the name of "liberty." Naturally, many liberals and assorted leftists have condemned the occupation, pointing out both the relevant legal and historical issues at play here, including the vicious tradition of white militias in the US, the blatant disregard of environmental regulations, and much more that is well beyond the scope of this article.

But what has been missed by seemingly every pundit, left and right, who has chimed in on the Oregon occupation is the unmistakable stench of provocation. Simply put, something is off about this whole story, and it struck me from the first moment I read about what was happening, who was involved, and who wasn't involved. Specifically, there are indications that this entire fiasco has been manufactured by either government agencies themselves or some other private forces for any number of reasons.

This week on Behind the Headlines, we're interviewing - for the second time - freelance journalist and human rights activist Eva Bartlett, who was on this show two months ago. Bartlett was aboard the Dignity, one of five Free Gaza relief operations to successfully sail to the Gaza Strip in 2008. She ended up staying in Gaza for some time, reporting from there during Israeli Operations 'Cast Lead' in 08/09, and 'Pillar of Defense' in 2012.

In the last couple of years, Bartlett has been one of the few Western journalists to report truthfully on the situation in Syria, a country she has visited several times, including independently on a journalist visa. Bartlett recently returned from spending 8 days over Christmas in the war-torn country, where she attended conferences, visited recently liberated districts, and met Syrian officials, religious and community leaders.

Listeners can find Eva's writings on Syria and Palestine at her blog, InGaza.wordpress.com, and support her continuing work as a voice for the voiceless through SyriaSolidarityMovement.org.

We hope you'll join us from 2-4pm EST / 8-10pm CET, this Sunday 10th January 2016, for an account of life in Syria you won't hear anywhere else.

Running Time: 01:32:00

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