The Islamic State militant group claimed Tuesday to have beheaded an American photojournalist in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq.

A video posted on YouTube, later removed, purported to show the execution of James Foley after he recited a statement in which he called the U.S. government "my real killers." A second prisoner, said to be Steven Joel Sotloff, like Foley an American journalist who disappeared while covering Syria's civil war, then appears in the video.

The masked executioner, speaking in English with what sounds like a British accent, identifies Sotloff and says that "the life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision."

American intelligence officials believe the video is authentic but are continuing to evaluate it, senior U.S. officials said Wednesday morning.

In a statement Tuesday, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said of the video: "If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends. We will provide more information when it is available."

Switzerland has said it will not re-export European agricultural products to Russia that now can't get access to the country's market.

"We have had requests from European countries, including the producers of fruits, vegetables, dairy products and meat, but we didn't give permission to have their products imported to Switzerland and then exported to Russia," as ITAR-TASS quotes Jurg Jordi, a spokesman at the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture.

Swiss legislation requires certifying food exports for hygiene, which it can't do if the products are processed outside its borders, Jordi told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The newspaper writes that Moscow's embargo on imports of some food products from the EU, introduced early August, did not affect Switzerland as it did not apply wide sanctions against Russia.

"As such the Russian ban on EU cheese imports hasn't had much of an effect on us yet," the WSJ quotes Daniel Daetwyler, the Chief Executive of InterCheese.

Islamic State militants, who released a video allegedly showing the beheading of a US journalist, 'represent a direct threat' to UK security said Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. David Cameron has cut short his holiday to respond to the incident.

American photojournalist James Wright Foley went missing almost two years ago while covering the conflict in Syria as a freelance photographer. The militants proclaimed the violent act as "a message to America" for its decision to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in Iraq.

In the grisly film, Foley appears kneeling beside a masked man who speaks with a British accent. Foley read a letter which blames the US government for "hammering the final nail into his coffin" before his beheading with a short blade.

A linguistics expert, Dr Claire Hardaker, who has studied the audio from the short film, told LBC Radio listeners she believes the killer is from London.

The Islamist group also threatened to kill another American journalist, Steven Joel Sotloff of World Affairs and Time, stating his life "depends on Obama's next decision." Sotloff has been missing since mid-2013, and his Twitter account indicates his last known location was Libya.

"It seemed like Mrs. Elliott was taking our best friends away from us."

These are the words of a third-grader from Riceville, Iowa. Her schoolteacher, Jane Elliott, had just put her class through an exercise that showcased the viciousness and injustice of white supremacy in the late 1960s.

Jane Elliott has since replicated this exercise countless times, but her original lesson remains a groundbreaking insight into the mechanisms of supremacy as depicted in the documentary A Class Divided. By labeling the blue-eyed students in her class smarter and better, and giving them more privileges than the brown-eyed students, Jane Elliott instantly creates division and hostility between the two groups.

She constantly reinforces the superiority of her blue-eyed students who suddenly feel more confident and perform better at tasks than their now demoralized and dejected brown-eyed classmates. This division creates conflict between the students, which greatly upsets them and even leads to physical fights.

Jane Elliott is stunned by the results of her exercise, saying: "I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes."

Jane Elliott's exercise clearly illustrates how simple it is to ignite conflict between people once a group of individuals is elevated above another. It also demonstrates how supremacy creates powerlessness in the "inferior" group and that the loss of personal power eventually leads to hostility and violence.

This is the system we live under today - a hierarchy that ranks people based on their "worth" and socio-economic status.

On Thursday, Ukraine's parliament passed a law that will allow foreign investors to lease up to 49 percent of Ukraine's transit pipelines and underground gas storage facilities. The bill, which had failed to pass just weeks earlier, was approved by the slimmest of margins, 2 votes, suggesting that there might have been some arm twisting or bribery behind the scenes. The new law is a victory for the Obama administration and western elites who want to control the flow of gas from Russia to the EU, set prices, and make sure that transactions continue to be denominated in dollars. Here's a little more background from an article in Reuters:

"Ukraine's parliament approved a law on Thursday to allow gas transit facilities to be leased on a joint venture basis with participation from firms in the European Union or United States....The government has said the joint venture will bring in investment and remove the need for the South Stream pipeline, which Russia's Gazprom is building to take gas to southeastern Europe across the Black Sea, avoiding Ukraine.

If South Stream is built, it threatens to deprive Ukraine's badly strained budget of the transit fees that it currently receives from Russia for gas heading towards Europe.

The EU imports 30 percent of its natural gas needs from Russia, and about half of that comes via Ukraine, with some already having been diverted through the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea." ("Ukrainian parliament backs bill to open gas pipelines to EU, U.S. firms", The Star)

You can see that the bloody, fratricidal conflict in Ukraine has nothing to do with democracy, sovereignty or even "evil" Putin. It's all about gas and pipelines. It's all part of Washington's grand plan to put a wedge between Russia and the EU, control the flow of vital resources, and establish NATO bases on Russia's western flank. The fact that the article mentions South Stream is particularly revealing. The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to sabotage South Stream so that Russia will be unable to bypass troublemaking Ukraine and sell its gas directly to countries across Europe. (Here's a map of South Stream.)

After Monday's deployment of the National Guard to Ferguson by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon following more than a week of protests, police tightened down onprotesters' right to peaceable assembly. In this video, residents speak about the connection between the militarization of society and the attack on democratic rights.

The European Union is not (anymore) guided by politicians with a grasp of history, a sober assessment of global reality, or simple common sense connected with the long term interests of what they are guiding. If any more evidence was needed, it has certainly been supplied by the sanctions they have agreed on last week aimed at punishing Russia.


One way to fathom their foolishness is to start with the media, since whatever understanding or concern these politicians may have personally they must be seen to be doing the right thing, which is taken care of by TV and newspapers.

In much of the European Union the general understanding of global reality since the horrible fate of the people on board the Malaysian Airliner comes from mainstream newspapers and TV which have copied the approach of Anglo-American mainstream media, and have presented 'news' in which insinuation and vilification substitute for proper reporting. Respected publications, like the Financial Times or the once respected NRC Handelsblad of the Netherlands for which I worked sixteen years as East Asia Correspondent, not only joined in with this corrupted journalism but helped guide it to mad conclusions. The punditry and editorials that have grown out of this have gone further than anything among earlier examples of sustained media hysteria stoked for political purposes that I can remember. The most flagrant example I have come across, an anti-Putin leader in the (July 26) Economist Magazine, had the tone of Shakespeare's Henry V exhorting his troops before the battle of Agincourt as he invaded France.

One should keep in mind that there are no European-wide newspapers or publications to sustain a European public sphere, in the sense of a means for politically interested Europeans to ponder and debate with each other big international developments. Because those interested in world affairs usually read the international edition of the New York Times or the Financial Times, questions and answers on geopolitical matters are routinely shaped or strongly influenced by what editors in New York and London have determined as being important. Thinking that may deviate significantly as can now be found in Der Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Handelsblatt, does not travel across German borders. Hence we do not see anything like a European opinion evolving on global affairs, even when these have a direct impact on the interests of the European Union itself.

Last year I published Our American Pravda, making the case for the utter corruption and unreliability of the mainstream American media, both in the past and especially in recent years. The enormous lacunae I daily noticed in the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other leading media outlets were a major motivation behind my creation of The Review, whose readership has grown enormously in recent weeks.

A perfect example of this dangerous MSM "conspiracy of silence" may be found in the growing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, greatly accelerated by the death of almost 300 passengers aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, shot down last month over Eastern Ukraine. The American media and its Western counterparts have almost unanimously placed the blame on anti-government rebels backed by Russia, and darkly insinuate that Russian President Vladimir Putin has the blood of those hundreds of innocent lives on his hands. London's once-respected Economist magazine has repeatedly run shrill covers promoting the great threat of Putin and Russia to world peace, even featuring a photo of the former under the stark title "A Web of Lies." There is the serious likelihood of a renewed Cold War against Russia and with the neoconized Republicans in Congress proposing legislation to incorporate Ukraine as an American military ally and deploy American forces there, the actual possibility of a military clash near the Russian border.

As readers know, I have been overwhelmingly consumed with my own software work in recent months and aside from closely reading the NYT and WSJ every morning, have devoted little time or effort to following the disastrous Ukraine situation. But just carefully reading between the lines of our elite MSM outlets and glancing at a few contrary perspectives presented on alternative websites have left me highly suspicious of our media narrative, leading me to wonder where the finger of guilt actually points.

For example, according to the official American story, MH17 was downed by rebels armed with a BUK anti-aircraft missile battery. As it happens, the pro-American Ukraine government possesses a large inventory of exactly those weapons, while it is far from clear that the rebels have a single unit, let alone the expertise to operate such sophisticated devices. Furthermore, there apparently exists radar evidence demonstrating that Ukraine fighter planes were in the immediate vicinity of MH17 just before it was shot down and there are firsthand reports from investigators on the ground that portions of the crashed fuselage showed strong evidence of having been hit the sort of heavy machine-gun fire employed in air combat. I find it extremely suspicious that the American government has repeatedly refused to release the evidence supporting its narrative, while the Russian government has released copious evidence supporting its contrary perspective.

"If you don't want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don't argue with me, don't call me names, don't tell me that I can't stop you, don't say I'm a racist pig, don't threaten that you'll sue me and take away my badge. Don't scream at me that you pay my salary, and don't even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?" - Sunil Dutta, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 17 years.

Life in the American police state is an endless series of don'ts delivered at the end of a loaded gun: don't talk back to police officers, don't even think about defending yourself against a SWAT team raid (of which there are 80,000 every year), don't run when a cop is nearby lest you be mistaken for a fleeing criminal, don't carry a cane lest it be mistaken for a gun, don't expect privacy in public, don't let your kids walk to the playground alone, don't engage in nonviolent protest near where a government official might pass, don't try to grow vegetables in your front yard, don't play music for tips in a metro station, don't feed whales, and on and on.

For those who resist, who dare to act independently, think for themselves, march to the beat of a different drummer, the consequences are invariably a one-way trip to the local jail or death.

What Americans must understand, what we have chosen to ignore, what we have fearfully turned a blind eye to lest the reality prove too jarring is the fact that we no longer live in the "city on the hill," a beacon of freedom for all the world.

Far from being a shining example of democracy at work, we have become a lesson for the world in how quickly freedom turns to tyranny, how slippery the slope by which a once-freedom-loving people can be branded, shackled and fooled into believing that their prisons walls are, in fact, for their own protection.

Having spent more than half a century exporting war to foreign lands, profiting from war, and creating a national economy seemingly dependent on the spoils of war, we failed to protest when the war hawks turned their profit-driven appetites on us, bringing home the spoils of war - the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc. - to be distributed for free to local police agencies and used to secure the homeland against "we the people."

Russian president Vladimir Putin lives his life in the ceaseless glare of the world's regard. At work and on holiday, he is surrounded by a loyal gaggle of Kremlin pool journalists, TV cameras and photographers. Russia's nightly news bulletins invariably lead with news of his daily activities. Yet he has succeeded in keeping his immediate family out of the spotlight with a fanatical thoroughness worthy of a KGB special operation.

No confirmed photographs exist of Putin's two daughters, 29-year-old Maria, nicknamed Masha, and 28-year-old Ekaterina, known as Katya, as adults. The girls attended a university in Russia under false names; even their classmates were unaware of their real identity.

And when, in the aftermath of the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17, a Dutch tabloid claimed that Masha was living in the Netherlands with her Dutch partner, packs of reporters and protesters who flocked to her alleged residence were unable to find her - or anyone who knew her. Pieter Broertjes, mayor of Hilversum, Netherlands, called for Masha to be deported (he later retracted the statement), and Ukrainian protesters picketed outside the luxury apartment block where they were said to have lived. But the couple were long gone - if they were ever really there at all.

The veil of secrecy that surrounds the Putins is rigorously enforced by the Kremlin. Journalists who violate the taboo of reporting on the private life of Russia's first family are dealt with swiftly and summarily. In 2008, when the liberal newspaper Moskovsky Korrespondent reported that Putin was planning to marry a rhythmic gymnast named Alina Kabayeva, the editor was forced to resign within hours. According to fired editor Grigory Nekhoroshev, the paper's proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev - a billionaire financier who owns the Evening Standard and The Independent in London - initially promised to stand by his journalists before receiving a call from "a senior figure from the presidential administration." Lebedev took the hint, and Moskovsky Korrespondent never appeared again.