The US mid-term elections, which saw the Republican Party take control of the Senate and extending their hold over the House of Representatives, proves one thing: money can buy an election, but it can't buy democracy. That indictment of eviscerated democracy in America, however, is a portent of more foreign aggression and wars.

Congressional elections this week saw $4 billion being poured into media campaigns - a record high. But even with this largesse, the majority of American voters were underwhelmed by what was on offer. Some 60 per cent of voters did not even bother to cast their ballots. That is perhaps the real, shameful result of this election. Americans by their absence at polling stations are saying that there is nothing worthwhile voting for from among the two parties, whether Republican or Democrat.

In other words, democracy in the US is certified as dead. The official winners of the mid-term elections may be Republicans. With deep pockets splurging on vitriolic television attack-ads, the Grand Old Party may have managed to buy a majority of seats in the Senate and House, but buying these seats hardly amounts to a mandate-to-rule from the people - when the vast majority of citizens refuse to vote, and many of those that did vote express only contempt for both parties.

As an article in the Washington Post notes: "Voters interviewed leaving the polls Tuesday offered negative opinions about almost everything, from the president and Congress to the Republican and Democratic parties to the state of the economy, the direction of the country and confidence in the federal government."

You have to sneak a laugh at Washington for its asinine irony. Only days before the mid-terms, US officials were denouncing the elections in Eastern Ukraine as a sham. No matter that more than 60 per cent of the electorate in Donetsk and Luhansk mustered the courage to cast their votes to elect pro-independence leaders, while they are being slaughtered by the Western-backed regime in Kiev firing Grad rockets and cluster bombs at civilian areas.

The disturbing thing is that the election-buyers in the US will claim - in spite of the facts - that they have a mandate to embark on a more militarist foreign policy. This is a classic case of adding 2 plus 2 and getting 5, a conclusion that only multi-millionaire politicians divorced from public reality could arrive at.

The FBI is pressuring law-abiding Islamic community leaders throughout the United States to spy on fellow Muslims in an effort to sniff out extremism in the US in what amounts to religious profiling, a top Muslim civil rights organization has alleged.

Mosques in California, Florida, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, and other states have been targeted for surprise visits by FBI agents seeking Muslim leaders to act as informants on members of their communities or congregations, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

"It's happening all over the country," said Ibrahim Hooper, a CAIR spokesman, according to the Los Angeles Times. "The agents are approaching these community leaders at mosques with basic questions that quickly turn into something different: pressure to become informants."

The EU's policy towards Moscow would have been completely different if the US was not so keen on having the Union on the hook, and sanctions which favor no one but Washington were imposed, Willy Wimmer, former Vice President of the OSCE Assembly told RT.

The EU's top diplomat Federica Mogherini says the Union must look harder at ways to compromise with Moscow over the situation in Ukraine. She also said that the sanction pressure must be kept up and that action must be taken together with NATO.

RT discussed this with Wimmer, OSCE Assembly vice president in 1994-2000, and a former deputy Defense Minister of Germany.

RT: Federica Mogherini says the EU must engage in dialogue with Russia - which is something her predecessor wasn't too keen on. Are things improving in Brussels-Moscow relations?

Willy Wimmer: I think it is little bit too early to say this, but the first remarks of this Italian lady who is now responsible for the European Union foreign policy were interesting because she didn't continue the words [her] predecessors used and especially words which are today still used in NATO. So this was first sign of a new position and everybody in Europe now looks on the situation: what might be its outcome and what might be the result. Because everything that we have heard until today is not as good as it should be.

A curious silence in the U.S.-led battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is coming from Israel, which has advocated the overthrow of Iran's ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, but has had little to say about the brutal Islamists seeking to oust Assad.

In the war on the Islamic State, the alleged scourge of humanity, little is heard about the position of America's much-ballyhooed greatest ally in the Middle East, if not the world, Israel. Now the Islamic State has been conquering territory in very close proximity to the border of Israel. But Israel does not seem to be fearful and it is not taking any action.

And the Obama administration and American media pundits do not seem to be the least bit disturbed. This is quite in contrast to the complaints about other Middle East countries such as Turkey that are being harshly criticized for their failure to become actively involved in fighting the Islamic State.

For example, a New York Times editorial, "Mr. Erdogan's Dangerous Game," begins, "Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once aspired to lead the Muslim world. At this time of regional crisis, he has been anything but a leader. Turkish troops and tanks have been standing passively behind a chicken-wire border fence while a mile away in Syria, Islamic extremists are besieging the town of Kobani and its Kurdish population."

An article in the Boston Globe read "Turkey has failed Kobani, Kurds." An editorial in the USA Today was titled "Turkey waits as ISIL crushes Kobani."

Neocon Charles Krauthammer in "Erdogan's Double Game" compared Turkey's failure to come to the defense of the Kurds in the surrounded border town of Kobani to Stalin's unwillingness to aid the uprising of Polish nationalist forces in Warsaw in 1944, thus allowing the latter's destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

"For almost a month, Kobani Kurds have been trying to hold off Islamic State fighters," Krauthammer wrote. "Outgunned, outmanned, and surrounded on three sides, the defending Kurds have begged Turkey to allow weapons and reinforcements through the border. Erdogan has refused even that, let alone intervening directly."

Even the normally antiwar Noam Chomsky expressed support for protecting the Kurds. "With regard to Kobani, it is a shocking situation," Chomsky opined. "This morning's newspaper described Turkish military operation against Kurds in Turkey, not against ISIS, a couple of kilometers across the border where they are in danger of being slaughtered. I think something should be done at the UN in terms of a strong resolution to call for a ceasefire."

"It is hard to impose the use of force," Chomsky continued, "but to the extent that it can be done try and protect Kobani from destruction at the hands of ISIS, which could be a major massacre with enormous consequences." Chomsky added that "the strategic significance of the town in the Kurdish region is pretty obvious, and the Turkish role is critical in this."

So Israel is building 2,610 new housing units in East Jerusalem and in contiguous areas on the West Bank at a time when international sentiment against its unending occupation of Palestine is growing, particularly among Europeans if one goes by recent developments in Sweden, Britain and in Ireland. The administration of President Barack Obama is reported to be "deeply concerned" and even seriously annoyed by the latest Israeli thumb inserted squarely in the American eye, but has not taken any action to pressure Tel Aviv into reversing course.

Pardon me while I yawn. In the absence of any serious consequences coming from Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will do whatever he wants in the firm belief that there is no one who can force him to do otherwise. Israel owns Congress and the mainstream media while its proliferating think tanks and promoters in a score of major Jewish organizations continue to spew out self-serving nonsense. So who is going to say nay?

Obama's mistake lies ultimately in his apparent belief that Israel is somehow a nation guided by tangible interests much like any other, which is particularly ironic as he shares the same type of delusion as the Israeli leadership. Both he and Netanyahu somehow believe that their respective countries are not bound by any internationally accepted standards that determine how one should behave, Washington somehow having designated itself as "leader of the free world" while Tel Aviv defines itself as a chosen people living in a land granted by covenant from Yahweh himself.

Protests continue to spread across France following the murder of 21-year-old environmental activist Remi Fraisse late last month. Despite the French government stating that concussion grenades would no longer be used against protesters, French security forces have continued firing them, along with large quantities of tear gas and rubber bullets.

Video evidence of agents provocateurs at several protests suggest the wave of mass demonstrations breaking out across Europe are being turned violent by state-sponsored groups like 'Black Bloc'. Sott.net's Joe Quinn spoke with PressTV to explain why the state likes its dissenters violent.

Fasten your seat belts: the information war already unleashed against Russia is bound to expand to Brazil, India and China.

Brazil, Russia, India and China, as it's widely known, are the top four members of the BRICS group of emerging powers, which also includes South Africa and will incorporate other Global South nations in the near future. The BRICS immensely annoy Washington - and its Think Tankland - as they embody the concerted Global South push towards a multipolar world.

Bottles of Crimean champagne could be bet that the US response to such a process couldn't be but a sort of total information war - not dissimilar in spirit to the NSA's deep state Total Information Awareness (TIA), a crucial element of the Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. The BRICS are seen as a major threat - so to counteract them implies domination of the information grid.

Vladimir Davydov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Latin America, was spot on when he remarked, "The current situation shows that there are attempts to suppress not only Russia but also the BRICS given that the global role of this association has only intensified."

Russia demonization has quickly escalated in the US from sanctions related to Ukraine to Putin as the "new Hitler" and the resurrection of the time-tested Cold War scare "The Russians are coming".

In the case of Brazil the information war already started way before the reelection of President Dilma Rousseff. As much as Wall Street and its local comprador elites were doing everything to tank what they define as a "statist" economy, Dilma was also personally demonized.

Not so far-fetched steps in the near future might include sanctions on China because of its "aggressive" position in the South China Sea, or Hong Kong, or Tibet; sanctions on India because of Kashmir; sanctions on Brazil because of human rights violations or excess deforestation. Selected Indian diplomats, off the record, deplore that the first BRICS nation to buckle under pressure will be India.

As the BRICS are the de facto key bricks in building a more democratic, inclusive global system of international relations and financial system - there are no others in the market - at least they seem to be alert enough. If they are not, each nation is bound to be knocked out one by one.

Georgy Toloraya, executive director of the Russian National Committee on BRICS Research, points out that at least there's "more and more communication taking place through BRICS channels today."

Brazilians, for instance, are particularly interested in investment cooperation. The BRICS Development Bank will be a reality in 2015. And a Russian team is preparing a detailed report on the future prospects of BRICS cooperation bound to be discussed in-depth in Beijing in over a week, concomitant to the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit.

Ahead of a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin this week, senior Chinese and Russian military officials said on Wednesday that the two countries have reached agreements on a slew of important military cooperation projects during the 17th round of strategic consultation.

"Many cooperation projects in critical areas were agreed upon during the current round of consultation," said Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces without revealing details.

Gerasimov met Wang Guanzhong, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Wednesday.

By now even the New York Times is openly talking about the secret Obama Administration strategy of trying to bankrupt Russia by using its oil-bloated Bedouin bosom buddy, Saudi Arabia, to collapse the world price of oil. However, it's beginning to look like the neo-conservative Russia-haters and Cold war wanna-be hawks around Barack Obama may have just shot themselves in their oily foot. As I referred to it in an earlier article, their oil price strategy is basically stupid. Stupid, as all consequences have not been taken into account. Take now the impact on US oil production as prices plummet.

The collapse in US oil prices since September may very soon collapse the US shale oil bubble and tear away the illusion that the United States will surpass Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world's largest oil producer. That illusion, fostered by faked resource estimates issued by the US Department of Energy, has been a lynchpin of Obama geopolitical strategy.

Now the financial Ponzi scheme behind the increase of US domestic oil output the past several years is about to evaporate in a cloud of fictitious smoke. The basic economics of shale oil production are being ravaged by the 23% oil price drop since John Kerry and Saudi King Abdullah had their secret meeting near the Red Sea in early September to agree on the Saudi oil price war against Russia.

The killing of nine Gaza Freedom Flotilla protesters in 2010 by Israeli forces is "not of sufficient gravity" to come under the ICC's jurisdiction, despite a "reasonable basis" to believe that war crimes were committed, court papers say.

"The information available provides a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes under the Court's jurisdiction have been committed in the context of interception and takeover of the Mavi Marmara by IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) soldiers on 31 May 2010," reads the International Criminal Court document, a copy of which was seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

The 2010 Israeli raid on Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters killed eight Turkish nationals and an American of Turkish origin, as the vessels tried to penetrate the Israeli blockade on Gaza maintained since 2007. The lawsuit against the state of Israel was filed in The Hague in May 2013 on behalf of Turkey's Humanitarian Aid Foundation (IHH) and victim's families, with an authorization from Comoros Islands in which the raided vessel, Mavi Marmara, was registered.

"The evidence of Israeli aggression was presented to the court. The accused include Israeli officials involved in the raid, including the Israeli prime minister, defense minister and the chief of staff of the Israeli military," Ramazan Arıtürk, a lawyer for the victims, told the press at the time.