Major transnational corporations, including Kraft, Motorola, Lenovo, Tyson and HTC have announced mass layoffs in recent days amid a boom in mergers and acquisitions, which are on track to hit a record this year.

Processed foods maker Kraft Heinz Co said Wednesday that it would cut 2,500 jobs in North America, amounting to 5 percent of its global workforce. The announcement is the result of last month's $49 billion merger between Kraft and H.J. Heinz Co, in a deal orchestrated by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.

The announced layoffs will include 700 at the company's headquarters in Northfield, Illinois, near Chicago. Thousands more layoffs are expected as a result of the deal, as the company said it was "confident" that it would meet its estimated cost savings from the merger of $1.5 billion through 2017.

On Thursday, Chinese computer maker Lenovo announced 3,200 layoffs, or 5 percent of its global workforce. The layoffs will be concentrated in the company's Motorola Mobility subsidiary, which this week announced an initial round of 500 layoffs in its Chicago-area headquarters. Another three hundred employees will lose their jobs with the closure of the company's facility in Plantation, Florida. Lenovo purchased Motorola Mobility from Google in 2014.

Also Thursday, Smartphone maker HTC announced that it would slash 2,250 jobs, or 15 percent of its global workforce, by the end of the year. The company is seeking to cut costs by 35 percent.

These layoffs follow last month's announcement by Microsoft that it would eliminate 7,800 positions, mostly from its Nokia mobile phone division that it acquired in 2013. Only weeks later, San Diego-based semiconductor company Qualcomm Incorporated announced 4,700 layoffs.

This week on 'Behind the Headlines', hosts Niall Bradley and Joe Quinn spoke with Scottish author and editor, Robin Ramsay.

Ramsay has been editor and publisher of the Lobster magazine since it was founded in 1983. He has also written a number of books, including Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, Prawn Cocktail Party: The Hidden Power of New Labour, and Who Shot JFK?

For ten years, he also wrote a column in the Fortean Times on conspiracy theories.

Lobster's contributors include academics and journalists, and is today published twice annually. The magazine focusses primarily on parapolitics - the influence of intelligence and security services on politics and world trade - and combines the examination of conspiracy theories and contemporary history.

Tune in to find out some of the British security service's dirty secrets, and find out what this old Labour Party member thinks of the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn becoming the party's new leader...

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The recently disclosed documents unveil that the National Security Agency owes its successful internet surveillance to its most devoted partner - AT&T Inc.

It turns out that the NSA harbored especially warm feelings for its most fertile and "highly collaborative" partner, AT&T, even taking the trouble to remind its representatives to be nice to AT&T employees.

"This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship," one of the documents reads.

If crude's slump back to a six-year low looks bad, it's even worse when you reflect that summer is supposed to be peak season for oil.

U.S. crude futures have lost 30 percent since the start of June, set for the biggest drop since the West Texas Intermediate crude contract started trading in 1983. That beats the summer plunges during the global financial crisis of 2008, the Asian economic slump in 1998 and the global supply glut of 1986.

I don't really know, I don't understand how it feels: to live in a rich European country, which is rich mainly because it has been directly plundering many poor nations around the world. Or it has been plundering by association, through its membership in some extremist organization like NATO. To live there, refusing to acknowledge why it is rich, how it became rich.

Palaces, theatres, railroads, hospitals and parks in that rich country are built on broken skeletons and restless specters, on lakes of blood and shameless theft.

When one looted country after another begins to sink, when there is nothing left there, when children begin dying from hunger and when men commence fighting each other over tiny boulders and dirty pieces of turf, then pathetic boats or dinghies begin crossing the waterways, bringing half starved, half-mad refugees to the European sea-fronts decorated with marble.

Credit traders have an uncanny knack for sounding alarm bells well before stocks realize there's a problem. This time may be no different.

Investors yanked $1.1 billion from U.S. investment-grade bond funds last week, the biggest withdrawal since 2013, according to data compiled by Wells Fargo & Co. Dollar-denominated company bonds of all ratings have lost 2.3 percent since the end of January, even as the Standard & Poor's 500 index gained 5.7 percent.

"Credit is the warning signal that everyone's been looking for," said Jim Bianco, founder of Bianco Research LLC in Chicago. "That is something that's been a very good leading indicator for the past 15 years."

Bond buyers are less interested in piling into notes that yield a historically low 3.4 percent at a time when companies are increasingly using the proceeds for acquisitions, share buybacks and dividend payments. Also, the Federal Reserve is moving to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006, possibly as soon as next month, ending an era of unprecedented easy-money policies that have suppressed borrowing costs.

Duhaime's legal definition of tyranny states: "A form of government other than a monarchy in which the formal written constitution is not adhered to and is broken by force of arms by a single person who then undertakes to rule as a monarch and primarily in his personal interests."

With his unprecedented number of oppressive executive orders bypassing both US Congress and constitutional rule of law, the ex-constitutional lawyer himself President Obama has become a bona fide dictator and traitor exercising tyranny over the people of the United States.

According to McLean and McMillan's Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics, essential features present in tyranny and dictatorship are that "the abuse of the state's coercive force operates in the absence of rule of law" but instead by "rule of the tyrant's arbitrary treatment of citizens if not by outright systematic use of terror." The latter application using terror against the populace more accurately describes the evolution of US dictatorship from one criminal regime (Bush-Cheney's) to Obama's criminal regime. On marching orders from the globalists, through both the neocons remain in charge.

Clearly mounting evidence blatantly exists in recent years that demonstrate a totalitarian police state power in America. The systematic militarization of police state USA has used terror to recklessly and maliciously abuse its own citizenry, particularly those of color in cities across this nation. The soaring rate of militarized police deploying lethal force to willfully murder unarmed Americans, calculatingly cause growing racial tensions and civil unrest with near complete impunity reflects the growing contempt that agents of US government increasingly harbor against the very citizens they took oaths swearing to protect and serve. This police state phenomenon has unfolded in parallel process with elected government leaders who treasonously plot and destroy America despite taking oaths to both uphold and protect the Constitution and the nation from both foreign and domestic enemies.

While cold-blooded murder of US citizens is skyrocketing now (over 70 times of other Western nations), federal agencies across the boards not even remotely related to either law enforcement or the military have been buying up billions of rounds of bullets that upon impact tear the human body apart. What does that say about a government that has its postal service, Social Security Administration and Department of Game and Wildlife arming themselves to the hilt with brutally lethal weapons? The answer is pathetically obvious. The federal government has embarked on waging an all-out war against its own hapless, law abiding citizens.

Clearly First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and public protest in this country are also no longer upheld or recognized as rule of law. In recent years the Occupy Movement and Democratic National Convention protests have been marred by excessive police brutality, bloody street violence and unlawful arrest. In the war against American protesters, police attacking them with the chemical weapon of tear gas that in any other war is criminally outlawed by international law, is used in the US to systematically silence the people's voice from ever being heard in the wake of totalitarian oligarchy.

Broadcasting from deep in the heart of the American Empire, join your hosts Harrison Koehli and Elan Martin, and fellow Sott.net editors, as they discuss everything from current events and the latest machinations and manipulations of the global elite to history, science, and religion, and how it all fits together.

This week, join our hosts as they discuss the modern history of color revolutions and their use as tools in modern warfare. We'll talk about some of the Western powers latest tactics, long-standing patterns, and the relation to macro-social pathology.

The Truth Perspective is brought to you by the SOTT Radio Network and SOTT.net, your one-stop source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events.

Live every Saturday from 2-4pm EST / 11am-1pm PST / 8-10pm CET.

Running Time: 01:58:00

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It hasn't quite got to the point of burning books - yet - but the latest move by the Western-backed regime in Kiev to ban dozens of Russian and opposition Ukrainian authors has a grim historical echo.

During the 1930s, Germany's Nazi Third Reich embarked on a frenzy of cultural "cleansing" which involved mass burning of books, led by torch-lit street processions and condemnations from propaganda minister Josef Goebbels.

Is there much difference between banning and burning?

Maybe the only difference is at what point on the slippery-slope we are at. This week, the authorities in the Ukrainian capital said they were blacklisting some 38 books authored by assorted Russian and Ukrainian writers. The banned reading list will likely be extended in the coming months. Some of the censored titles are reportedly fictional accounts of political intrigue by Ukrainian authors Gleb Bobrov and by Georgi Savitskiy; others are serious academic studies in social sciences and economics.

The terrorist network Islamic State (ISIL) is financed through illegal oil sales and makes a profit of about three million dollars a day. NATO members, including Turkey, the US and the United Kingdom tolerate the terrorists' oil smuggling activities, DWN reported.

Close allies of the United States and the UK secretly finance the terrorist group Islamic State (ISIL). The Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq and the Turkish military intelligence have supported ISIL's oil smuggling activities and supplied the terrorist group with weapons and equipment, DWN reported.

Oil smuggling is one of the main financial resources for ISIL. The terrorist group controls about 60 percent of Syria's oil production and seven major oil fields in Iraq.