The latest terror attacks in Russia are not, in themselves, news. This may sound odd to those who have endured them, but they are no different to any number of previous attacks. What IS news is that the world might finally be waking up to what is going on.

The same great programme to destabilise the Russian Federation and the countries friendly to it has been a dominant underlying feature of international relations since the end of the Cold War. Having spent so many years training its military to attack the Evil Empire, the West found itself with nothing left to do when the Soviet system imploded.

The West could only justify its existence by inventing new enemies and trying to destroy them in the same old way. There didn't have to be a reason: the mindset had to be preserved within the military to stop it being let loose on Western streets.

When you can't find enough grounds to attack people with regulars, you use irregulars you can wash your hands of: the principle of state-sponsored terrorism, a term the US coined to describe the actions of groups it conveniently put there to begin with.

South Stream, the $45 billion project to deliver Russian natural gas via underwater pipeline through the Black Sea to Bulgaria and on to other Balkan and southern European markets, is dead. Russian President Vladimir Putin made the death pronouncement on December 1, during a trip to Turkey to meet Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It has major geopolitical and economic consequences for the EU.

As Putin explained, "If Europe doesn't want to realize this, then it means it won't be realized. We will redirect the flow of our energy resources to other regions of the world. We couldn't get necessary permissions from Bulgaria, so we cannot continue with the project. We can't make all the investment just to be stopped at the Bulgarian border," Putin said. "Of course, this is the choice of our friends in Europe."

The Russian President didn't waste a minute to show how he plans that redirection. The real loser is not Russia, but the EU who managed yet again to shoot themselves in the foot by their buckling under to Washington pressure from Victoria Nuland's State Department and the Obama Administration hawks. The South Stream would have provided secure delivery to southern EU countries including Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Croatia and also Serbia. It would avoid the current transit pipelines running through Ukraine. Similarly, to avoid a repeat of the US-induced Ukrainian disruptions of Russian gas to the EU in 2009, Russia and Germany agreed the construction of Nord Stream, also avoiding Ukraine.

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be split up, NATO intelligence officials say, warning their colleagues against wrongly assessing Moscow's policy on the crisis in eastern Ukraine.

That's according to a report in German magazine Der Spiegel written by intelligence officers from several NATO countries. They argue that Moscow is not interested in escalating the situation in Ukraine, and is not going to repeat the scenario of what happened in Crimea.

The officers believe that the Kremlin is merely interested in seeing the reorganization of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics into functioning administrative units within a federalized Ukraine, if those regions can reach an agreement with Kiev.

The bloody conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Libya are the result of the interference by the US, which wants to gain control over the rich natural resources of those countries, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir told RT.

"The people in Sudan believe that the since the fall of the Soviet Union [in 1991], injustice and oppression has prevailed around the globe as the US became the sole hegemon and began running things with impunity in many regions, including ours," Bashir said.

In his interview with RT's Arabic Channel, the Sudanese president labeled Washington's policies in Middle East and North Africa as "harmful and destructive."

"Just look at what's now happening in Iraq and how it spread to Syria. All the suffering that is going in the Arab world is the work of the US," he said.

The U.S. Empire's plan was to use the chaos it generated in Ukraine to draw Russia into an overt military intervention, and to ultimately isolate, divide and pacify Russia. This is according to political analyst Andrew Korbyko, who labels this bizarre strategy the 'Reverse Brzezinski':

The idea is to create 'black holes' of absolute disorder in which Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are "damned if they do, damned if they don't" intervene. [...]

When it comes to Ukraine, humanitarian atrocities and war crimes are purposely being undertaken in order to anger the Russian leadership and provoke an emotional military reaction. [...]

The US sought to capitalize off of the chaos present in Syria and Ukraine in order to create 'black holes' to suck in Iran and Russia.

Whatever outcomes the Washington elites thought they would get, it's becoming increasingly obvious that this strategy has failed miserably. Putin recently stated that Russia won't fall for such tactics:

"We are not threatening anyone and are not planning to get involved in any geopolitical games, intrigues and especially conflicts, no matter who would want to pull us into them," Putin said at a meeting with military chiefs in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday.

The CIA is bracing for what could be one of the most damaging moments in its history: a public airing of its post-9/11 embrace of torture.

The Senate intelligence committee is poised to release a landmark inquiry into torture as early as Tuesday, even as the Obama administration has made a last-ditch effort to suppress a report that has plunged relations between the CIA and its Senate overseer to a historic low point.

The release of the torture report will represent the third major airing of faulty CIA intelligence in 15 years, following official commissions into the 9/11 plot and Saddam Hussein's defunct illicit weapons programs.

Let me put it this way. It would mean a lot more than winning a few GMO-labeling initiatives.

"The right to choose what's in your food" does not stop the ongoing gene drift, from GMO crops to non-GMO, across America. This drift is well on its way to making organic crops into genetically modified food, whether we like it or not.

And the blown-on-wind spread of tons and tons of Roundup, the poisonous Monsanto herbicide so "vital" to GMO farming...well, that's straight-out chemical warfare.

As it continues, what organic farmer will be able to guarantee his crops are pristine?

In Hawaii, we have a far different situation. Voters on the Big Island, Maui, and Kauai, against all odds, have managed to pass measures that would block Monsanto (and other biotech giants) from continuing their GMO/pesticide operations.

In other words, ban, not label.

The St. Louis County and Municipal Police Academy held a special class on October 24 for "upper-echelon law enforcement professionals." The subject:

OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTING - YOU CAN WIN WITH THE MEDIA

The class, taught by PR agent Rick Rosenthal, focused on such topics as "Managing the Media When Things Get Ugly (Think Ferguson)." A flyer promoting the class promised, "In addition to the Ferguson case study, this fast-paced class is jam-packed with the essential strategies and tactics, skills and techniques that will help you WIN WITH THE MEDIA!"

Sound boring? Not at all! "The training is also highly entertaining," the flyer emphasized. "You will learn a lot, and you'll have fun doing it!"

That does sound like fun - learning how to best manipulate the media after your colleagues have killed a human being.

How do you get €300 billion in (probably largely useless) "infrastructure investment" in Europe? Banning a $40 billion project from going forward is probably not going to help, not to mention that this one would actually have been useful. After Gazprom announced last week that it has had enough and is ditching the South Stream pipeline project (see "South Stream Dies" for details) after having invested $5 billion and run into countless politically motivated obstacles, EU commissariat president Juncker engaged in a back-tracking exercise, garnished with some nonsense about "Russia holding Bulgaria to ransom". Very likely he got an earful from Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borisov about the EU's sabotage of the project:

"European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has insisted the $40 billion South Stream natural gas pipeline can still go ahead and accused Russia of holding EU-member Bulgaria to ransom when it said it had abandoned the project.

Speaking after talks with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov, whose country South Stream would traverse making it a major beneficiary, Juncker rebutted Russia's statement that EU competition rules had killed it. He told reporters issues relating to the pipeline were not insurmountable and he was working with Bulgaria to address them.

Russia said on Monday it had abandoned the pipeline, which would have bypassed Ukraine, Gazprom's traditional transit route for Russian gas, citing EU competition requirements for a pipeline's ownership to be divorced from its cargo. It said it was working on an alternative route via Turkey.

Juncker accused Moscow of blackmailing Bulgaria, which retains strong political and economic ties with Moscow and is almost entirely dependent on Russia for its gas. "I am not accepting the simple easy idea that Bulgaria can be blackmailed as far as these energy relations are concerned," Juncker said.

"We'll take ... all the necessary steps to make sure that our relations with Russia will be improved, but it doesn't depend only on the willingness of the EU, of the European Commission. To dance a tango ... you need two dancers."

Borisov also said South Stream could be built and agreed it had to comply with EU rules, including legislation known as the third energy package, which limits how much of a pipeline a company can own if it also controls its contents. Further efforts to bring the project in line will be made on Tuesday, when EU energy ministers meet for regular talks. "I hope that all these technical details will be solved at this meeting including the third energy package," Borisov said. He added he had not received any official notice from Russia that South Stream was not going ahead.

EU sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia's calculation could have been that its announcement of South Stream's demise would place the Commission under pressure from some member states to soften its regulatory stance. At the same time, Russia has a struggle [sic, ed.] to find the cash for South Stream, given a falling oil price and economic sanctions."

(emphasis added)

A few remarks to the above: yes, the Bulgarians are understandably up in arms, but had it been up to them, the construction activities would never have been interrupted in the first place. As things stand, the previous Bulgarian government was badgered by the EU and visited by John McCain, whose primary mission was apparently to stop the pipeline from being built. The government announced that all construction on the pipeline would be stopped two hours after McCain left.

If the quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble implodes, who should be stuck with the bill? Well, if the "too big to fail" banks have their way it will be you and I. Right now, lobbyists for the big Wall Street banks are pushing really hard to include an extremely insidious provision in a bill that would keep the federal government funded past the upcoming December 11th deadline.

This provision would allow these big banks to trade derivatives through subsidiaries that are federally insured by the FDIC.

What this would mean is that the big banks would be able to continue their incredibly reckless derivatives trading without having to worry about the downside. If they win on their bets, the big banks would keep all of the profits.

If they lose on their bets, the federal government would come in and bail them out using taxpayer money. In other words, it would essentially be a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition.

Just imagine the following scenario. I go to Las Vegas and I place a million dollar bet on who will win the Super Bowl this year. If I am correct, I keep all of the winnings. If I lose, federal law requires you to bail me out and give me the million dollars that I just lost.

Does that sound fair?