The market is now forecasting that incumbent Dilma Rousseff will be re-elected president in a squeaker on Sunday. Although rival Aécio Neves could pull off an upset if enough of Marina Silva's voters choose him or opt-out of voting for anyone, his victory would now be seen as a surprise. Downside risks remain in Brazilian equities.

Neves came from polling in third place behind Marina Silva to clobbering her in the first round on Oct. 5, thus guaranteeing him the No. 2 contender spot against Dilma. Polls have suggested that at least 60% of Marina's voters would chose Neves on Sunday, but he needs a little more than 65% providing the rest of Marina's voters choose Dilma. So far, that has not been the case as only around 20% of Marina's voters said they would vote for Dilma on Sunday, meaning the current crop of undecided voters will call the shots. Recent polls show a technical tie.

It is worth noting that the market's forecast is not exactly the market's preference. At this stage, investors are broadly looking for change in Brasilia, even more so than the average Brazilian.

Vladimir Putin has lashed out at the United States for destabilizing the world order of checks and balances for its own gains. He also accused the West of inflaming the situation in Ukraine and said Russia was not interested in building an empire.


The Russian President delivered a fierce broadside aimed at the United States at a speech for the Valdai Club in Sochi, which is an informal group of scholars. He hit out at Washington for behaving without regard to the rest of the world's interests

"The system of international relations needed some changes, but the USA, who believe they were the winners of the Cold War, have not seen the need for this." He added that the US has been trying to create the world "for their own gains." The Russian President added that because of this, regional and global security had been weakened.

Putin also touched on the issue of the growth of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, while also accused the West of, "turning a blind eye," to the encroachment of international terrorism into Russia and Central Asia. Putin believes the US has played a considerable role in sponsoring the growth of Islamic extremism, using the example of Washington's funding of the Mujaheddin in the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980's, which eventually gave birth to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

I'm not one to hastily jump to conclusions about events like these, but the alleged shooting at the Canadian parliament and a nearby war memorial that took place today smells like a false-flag operation designed to expedite the Harper regime's militarist agenda.

The mainstream media is in a furor over the incident. Non-stop wall-to-wall coverage has commenced. Even American and British outlets have picked up the story.

One very noticeable clue as to the fraudulent nature of this event is the immediate calls from establishment propagandists for a crack down on free speech (what they call "hate speech") and the bolstering of Orwellian "anti-terrorism" laws which will in effect hand the state unlimited powers to spy on the citizenry of Canada and snuff out dissidents.

For example, the former CSIS Assistant Director Ray Boisvert said this on CBC:

"We need to get at those who are the purveyors of hate. So those who proselytize, those who are radicalizing, we need to find ways to go after them with respect to hate speech or perhaps its time for new legislation under the anti-terrorism act as we're seeing in the UK."

The former Canadian spy boss essentially echoed what British PM David Cameron said in a UN speech last month wherein he called for "non-violent extremists" to be criminalized. The traitorous British statesman specifically named 9/11 and 7/7 skeptics as falling within his dubious definition of "non-violent extremists."

A very cold winter in Eastern Europe may tilt its political balance in Russia's direction, And why the situation might go from bad to worse.

As winter approaches, Putin's hand is even stronger, as the crisis begins to transform from a military confrontation into a confrontation between Ukraine and Europe over the supply of Russian natural gas

Reports out of Milan regarding last Friday's much anticipated meeting between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko indicate that little progress has been made toward resolving the nearly yearlong Ukraine crisis. This, given the broader political currents at play in Europe, is unsurprising.

To begin with, Mr. Poroshenko has, for all intents and purposes, lost the military battle over the Donbas in resounding fashion. While his bloc leads in the polls ahead of next Sunday's parliamentary election, Poroshenko faces a number of other challenges, not least of which is a collapsing economy (some estimates have the Ukrainian economy shrinking by 10 percent this year) and a burgeoning populist backlash over the government's handling of the crisis.

So what we saw play out in Milan is more or less a repeat of the last Putin/Poroshenko meeting that took place in Minsk on August 26, because the same logic applies. Mr. Putin, as I wrote then, is always going to be the party - regardless of whether he is facing sanctions or a chorus of international condemnation - who will be playing the stronger hand in negotiations with Ukraine.

Yet as we approach November, his hand is even stronger, as the crisis begins to transform from a military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine into a confrontation between Ukraine and Europe over the supply of Russian natural gas. Ukraine serves as the transit point for 50 percent of EU-bound Russian LNG, and Ukraine's siphoning off of LNG bound for southeastern Europe, which led to Russia cutting off the supply in January 2006 and January 2009, is still fresh in the minds of European leaders.

The Rada's recent passage of a lustration bill, widely publicized acts of violence against sitting MPs through "trash bucket challenges," a popular revival of Nazi-era symbols and the incorporation of far-right elements into Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's "People's Front" do not exactly augur well for the chances for a tranquil political environment in either Ukraine or in Eastern Europe, where the memory of Ukrainian collaboration against the Poles and the region's Jews is fresher there than it is here in the United States.

Prisoners serving time in the state of Pennsylvania can now be sued for speaking up from behind bars after Governor Tom Corbett signed into law this week the Revictimization Relief Act that legislatures rushed to approve only days earlier.

The bill, signed on Tuesday by Corbett, a Republican, allows victims of "a personal injury crime" to sue the perpetrator if that offender "perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim."

State Rep. Mike Vereb, a Republican and a co-author of the act, announced earlier this month that he'd be rallying lawmakers to support the bill after former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal was allowed to record a commencement speech that was played for graduates of Goddard College during an October 5 ceremony.

European economic denial has reached the point where we are straddling the abyss, facing a code red moment of meltdown.

Whether by bloody-minded obstinacy or a clear incapacity to understand the mess it has overseen, the EU now reaches another of those critical junctures where simply papering over the cracks and maintaining a demented agitprop that growth is around the corner won't do. Besides, the green shoots of recovery have once again evaporated for the umpteenth time. As the world grows, Europe stagnates.

The EU isn't working - as 12 percent of the continent's population know only too well (including that lost generation under 30 born near the Mediterranean). Meanwhile, former Communist-turned-totalitarian-Europhile Jose Manuel Barroso has been enjoying a typically bombastic pre-retirement tour demonstrating a majestic lack of understanding for the stagnancy which has resulted from his decade-long failure as EU president.

Having spent much of the past year blithely mouthing a mantra of recovery, the outgoing commission departs the Berlaymont as even greater political failures than they were in national office before being elevated to Brussels. The demented hubris which preached recovery without coherent reworking of broken economies has been rendered mute by economic reality. Even in Brussels there may be a realization that political fudges won't do - the European empire must be restructured if it is not to face oblivion. As it is, the pathetic political posturing of national interests led by France (bankrupt) and Germany (deeply disingenuously protectionist) at all times have inexorably weakened Europe in a decade of prolonged growth in the emerging markets of the east.

Thus we reach an abyss for Europe. Germany (as predicted) is a post-peak economic powerhouse. Ukraine has led the EU to self-defeating sanctions which have further trimmed the economy just as growth has proven a mirage.

The Obama administration has until early December to detail its reasons for withholding as many as 2,100 graphic photographs depicting US military torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge ordered on Tuesday.

By 12 December, Justice Department attorneys will have to list, photograph by photograph, the government's rationale for keeping redacted versions of the photos unseen by the public, Judge Alvin Hellerstein instructed lawyers. But any actual release of the photographs will come after Hellerstein reviews the government's reasoning and issues another ruling in the protracted transparency case.

While Hellerstein left unclear how much of the Justice Department's declaration will itself be public, the government's submission is likely to be its most detailed argument for secrecy over the imagery in a case that has lasted a decade.

You have heard that Sweden is hunting a "submarine" and that it is "presumed to be Russian". Here is an example Financial Times of October 21 - which incidentally also announces that the Swedish Prime Minister vows to increase defense spending.

Not the slightest evidence

There are only three problems with this:

1) There is not the slightest evidence of there being anything military, neither that it is a submarine nor that, whatever the object might be, it is Russian.

2) Even with CNN, BBC and AlJazeera, this is nothing but speculative low-grade yellow press journalism.

Microchips embedded in the arms of citizens to track their activities, the total destruction of the middle classes and a cashless economy where an authoritarian state can freeze the accounts of dissenting citizens excluding them from all economic activity..... These are all part of the cheery scenario painted by the highly respected author and IMF-insider with connections to the Pentagon, Jim Rickards in his most recent article for Agora Financial.

"In the year 2024″ as the article is called, capitalism and markets will have been abolished in favor of a Marxist dystopia managed by the "New World Order." The savings and assets of the middle classes will have been annihilated. This unfolds through a series of panics and shocks to the markets and hyper-inflation. As the hyperinflation takes hold there is a mass exodus out of paper currency and into gold. The G-20 arrange for the mass confiscation of gold, to be stored in an enormous vault in the Swiss Alps, in order to force the public back onto newly created digital currency. To ensure that the public cannot protect themselves from the profligacy of governments gold is taken out of circulation forever.

America's neoconservatives, by stirring up trouble in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, are creating risks for the world's economy that are surfacing now in the turbulent stock markets, threatening another global recession, writes Robert Parry.

If you're nervously watching the stock market gyrations and worrying about your declining portfolio or pension fund, part of the blame should go to America's neocons who continue to be masters of chaos, endangering the world's economy by instigating geopolitical confrontations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Of course, there are other factors pushing Europe's economy to the brink of a triple-dip recession and threatening to stop America's fragile recovery, too. But the neocons' "regime change" strategies, which have unleashed violence and confrontations across Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and most recently Ukraine, have added to the economic uncertainty.