Britain's National Archives released a draft plan from the early 1980s in which the UK government considered recruiting mentally ill psychopaths to help maintain order in the country in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack.

According to the Independent, in 1982, Britain's Home Office ran a war games scenario in which the country was struck by 300 megatons of nuclear weapons over a 16-hour period.

Civil servants, police, firefighters, emergency military personnel and other government officials took part in the war game training exercise, named "Operation Regenerate."

We're supposed to know by now that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a really bad guy - so bad that anything that he says is further proof of his screeching hostility to the United States.

The Washington Post reported (10/24/14) on a recent Putin speech with this blistering lead sentence:

Making clear that the Kremlin has no intention of backing down from the worst Russia/Western crisis since the Cold War, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States on Friday of trying to "reshape the whole world" for its benefit, in a fiery speech that was one of the most anti-American of his 15 years as Russia's paramount leader.

Fiery anti-Americanism!

It's not hard to believe that Putin was highly critical of the US foreign policy, but what precisely did he say? The Post called it "a bitter distillation of Putin's anti-American rhetoric." The Post Karoun Demirjian and Michael Birnbaum reported that the address was an

unsmiling, straightforward worldview that blasted the United States as taking advantage of its powerful post-Cold War position to dictate misguided terms to the rest of the world. Putin faulted the United States for a rise in global terrorism, a resumption of a global arms race and a general worsening of global security.

"It never ceases to amaze me how our partners have been guilty of making the same mistakes time and again," Putin said, accusing the United States of breeding terrorists by upsetting the established order in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

OK, so fiery anti-Americanism is the belief that the United States desires a unipolar world where it calls the shots. Does anyone doubt US elites think otherwise?

Wading through all the chickensh*t over the last few days Netanyahu's "grassy knoll" comeback somehow missed out on all the action, but what the hoot guys? Where I come from that terminology only means one thing, as far as I know, that applies to the lexicon anywhere in America, if not the world. Hey, even Google agrees with me. And what are the chances Netanyahu and/or his speechwriters don't know this? Nada. Impossible.

Why would Netanyahu make a reference to one of the most alarming chapters in American history, the assassination of a beloved American president? And for many, an assassination still shrouded in mystery and deceit? I just thought it was very weird. Where is our press?

Winding down after scrutinizing, dissecting and eviscerating Goldberg's now infamous Chickensh*t article, Justin Raimondo, in The Chickenshit Lobby Is Mad As Hell - but just how mad are they? makes the argument had a leader of Iran slipped "grassy knoll" into a message to an American president the press would have gone bonkers. I agree.

What's surprising is how Netanyahu, in a speech to the Knesset, took the opportunity to answer his critics in the Obama administration: "Netanyahu angrily insisted he was 'under attack simply for defending Israel,' adding that he 'cherished' Israel's relationship with the US."

The famously combative Israeli Prime Minister went on to say:

"When there are pressures on Israel to concede its security, the easiest thing to do is to concede. You get a round of applause, ceremonies on grassy knolls, and then come the missiles and the tunnels."

Bibi, who spent many years in the United States, is surely cognizant of what his "grassy knoll" reference connotes. You can argue it was just an infelicitous phrase, or that Bibi was referring to himself, not Obama. Maybe so. But what if, say, an Iranian official, even a low-ranking one, had said such a thing? The uproar would be deafening. And so the question must be asked: was Bibi threatening the President of the United States?

If we take seriously Goldberg's depiction of the poisoned relationship between Bibi and Obama, the possibility can't be completely dismissed.

• Western media says they are legitimizing, stabilizing, and a vote for a turn towards the EU. This is simply not the case
• The country is still badly split, East vs. West
• Turnout was low, especially in the critical East
• The East is dis-enfranchised
• Neo-Nazi street violence still a real political factor
• Popular support for Poroshenko is low
• Support for the war is low
• The government, and popular opinion, are deeply fractured
• Poroshenko failed to consolidate himself as the country's leader

Sunday's Ukrainian parliamentary elections are being misunderstood by the international media and by elements of the Russian press.

There is a misperception that they were between competing parties with differing ideologies, such as those that take place elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world.

This is very far from being the case.

Ukraine this year has experienced a major power struggle between two factions of its political elite. In February 2014, one faction won the power struggle by resorting to a violent coup that gave it control of the levers of power.

Since then, this faction has moved to consolidate its control over the country by eliminating what is left of the defeated faction. Having secured control of the Presidency and the government and purged the Constitutional Court and media, it has now made use of early elections to purge the country's parliament - a fact admitted to by Poroshenko in his election decree.

This is intended to be followed by a thorough purge of the state bureaucracy, the police and the army, as authorised by a draconian albeit unconstitutional new "lustration" law. The intention is that by the end of this process, there will be no remnant of the rival faction that held power before the coup in February represented in any body of the state power.

The banner under which this purge is being carried out is, of course, "anti-corruption" and "democracy".

Neither should be taken too seriously.

That slogan, "the fight against corruption" is a perennial catchphrase that has been repeatedly used since the 1980s; it was used in the former Soviet Union by pro-Western liberal factions who desired to discredit and eliminate their opponents. As the post-Soviet history of both Russia and Ukraine show, pro-Western crusaders against corruption are largely unconcerned when it is committed by those they count amongst themselves.

As for "democracy", pro-Western liberal factions in both Russia and Ukraine have long since reinterpreted this word to mean a political system where they hold power and their opponents don't.

That this was a purge is revealed in the way in which the two parties most closely identified with the defeated faction - the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party - were destroyed before the elections to prevent them from taking part.

Events in the world of "high politics" over the last week have been very revealing, and entertaining. The US-Israel 'special relationship' has, apparently, been souring for a while.

At the beginning of this year Israeli defence minister Moshe Yaalon accused John Kerry of being "obsessive and messianic" in his pursuit of a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. A few months later Kerry warned Israel that it was in danger of becoming "an apartheid state". Israel is, of course, already a full-blown apartheid state with even the warmongering daughter of Israeli terrorists and now, Israeli Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni, complaining about segregated buses for Palestinians.

Two weeks ago the Obama administration warned that Israel risked alienating its "closest allies", and last week Yaalon was pointedly snubbed by senior administration officials during a visit to Washington. Then, several days ago, American-Israeli journalist and former Israeli prison guard, Jeffrey Goldberg, published an article in The Atlantic that cited an unnamed Obama official describing Netanyahu as a "chickenshit" in terms of the moribund Israel-Palestine 'peace process' and the alleged 'nuclear threat' from Iran.

British holidaymakers travelling anywhere in the world have been told to be vigilant as they are at risk of being attacked by Islamist terrorists.

The Foreign Office on Friday night issued a worldwide travel warning, saying tourists were at a risk of attack as a result of Britain's intervention in Iraq and Syria.

The warning applies to every country in the world, and the FCO updated travel guidance on its website. It reflects a "generalised threat" to Britons, rather than intelligence of a specific and credible attack.

The warning states: "There is considered to be a heightened threat of terrorist attack globally against UK interests and British nationals from groups or individuals motivated by the conflict in Iraq and Syria. You should be vigilant at this time."

There are many signs that fighting in Ukraine could resume soon. Ukraine continues to mass troops on borders.

After the elections of the past days, the Ukrainian parliament has assumed a new delicate equilibrium, with the parties in favor of a resumption of the offensive of the East in the clear majority.

Despite the approach of winter, which should be a motivation for dialogue with Moscow, Ukraine authorities do not seem willing to take that path.

In addition, Poroshenko needs a way to stave off economic default, and resuming the war would help him in this regard. There is a real risk of popular unrest due to the economic crisis, anger against the oligarchs, and inadequate heat in homes, and a renewed war would help Poroshenko repress the unrest.

Finally, the influence of the US is still very high in the government, and there are strong forces in Washington that would like to see a resumption of fighting.

Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation's communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel.

Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus - that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done only once in the nearly forty year history of the Act.

Patrick Thronson, Michigan Journal of Law (2013, Vol 46).

A bit of irony, perhaps, that on November 4, 2014 - as Americans go to the polls to cast their ballots for a slate of politicians at the local, state and federal levels - the august citizens of the United States will also celebrate the birth of the National Security Agency (NSA).

On November 4, 1952 the NSA was created by a Presidential Executive Order signed by then president Harry Truman. Earlier that year, in January 1952, Truman's state of the union address focused on the Korean War, the global Soviet-Communist threat, the "Iran oil situation", and the need to increase the production of US military equipment for use by American forces, and for transfer to Western European Allies. Truman called on Americans to seek guidance in the God of Peace even as a brutal shadow war was being waged by the United States to eliminate popularly elected "leftist" governments.

In 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the American presidency and with him came John Foster and Allan Dulles, two political appointees who would, it turns out, seek the counsel and expertise of "former" Nazi executioners, scientists and intelligence operatives. J Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was already on the case using whatever resources were at his disposal - including Nazis - to hunt down unionists, communists, dissenters and radicals wherever they might be. According to the UK's Guardian newspaper, Truman had this to say about Hoover and his FBI, "We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail... Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him."

From 1953-1961, Eisenhower, as Commander in Chief, constructed a nascent military-intelligence-law enforcement-industrial complex influenced directly by Nazi ideology and technological know-how. No wonder he warned the world about his creation, the military-industrial complex. At one time in the early 21st Century it was uncomfortable to call out America's ties to the Nazis. But that has changed particularly with the release of Eric Lichtblau's The Nazis Next Door (2014) and "The Collaboration" by Ben Urwand. It has also been confirmed by the overthrow of a nationally elected leader in Ukraine - Victor Yanukovych - and the open support of neo-Nazi groups largely responsible for that event. Is it a coincidence that the head of the CIA, John Brennan, visited with the neo-Nazi usurpers not long after the coup given the CIA's history?

The countries of the former Warsaw Pact are not knuckling under to pressure from Russia. They're trying to avoid a new cold war

Vladimir Putin, the wily strategist of Russian revanchism, is well on his way to reconstructing the Warsaw Pact. That, at least, is what the pundits of The Washington Post are making it out to seem. Last week, Jackson Diehl penned a column on how Putin has driven a wedge between NATO and its easternmost members. Anne Applebaum, meanwhile, pins the failure to maintain quiet on the eastern front on NATO itself and its decision not to establish bases in the region 10 years ago. The resulting crisis of confidence in what were once Soviet satellites, she laments, has undermined alliance cohesion.

These misreadings of what's taking place on the eastern stretches of Europe contribute to an almost 1946-like sense of foreboding and inevitability. The small countries of Eastern Europe are bending to Moscow's will, and the West is doing little more than appease the bear. Diehl and Applebaum stop short of declaring a new Iron Curtain and insisting that the region choose sides (over and above membership in NATO). But their all-or-nothing logic tends in that direction.

Contrary to these assertions, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and the rest of the region are not replaying 1946. Although these governments are pursuing very different strategies, they all know that a new Cold War would exact a terrible price on their countries. In most cases, they are quite sensibly trying to forestall this scenario. NATO's imperative to push ever eastward, which pundits like Applebaum are urging it to do now under the cover of demonstrating resolve, will only make matters worse.

Another anti-police brutality protest turned violent in the French city of Rennes, with masked youths and police engaging in running street battles. The unrest follows the death of a young environmental activist earlier this week.

Overnight Thursday, protesters in the northwestern city lobbed flairs at police and flipped over cars, some of which they set ablaze. Police responded by firing tear gas. The number of arrests or injures, if any, remains unclear.

A similar protest in Paris on Wednesday also descended into violence. Around 250 people gathered outside City Hall in Paris, with some throwing rocks at police and writing "Remi is dead, the state kills" on walls, The Local's French edition reports. At least 33 people were taken into police custody following the unrest.