President Barack Obama defended nuclear negotiations with Iran, arguing that military action would not end the country's controversial nuclear program. He stated a deal with Tehran is the only way to ensure it does not develop a bomb.

Speaking with Israel's Channel 2 television program "Uvda," President Obama insisted that the best way to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was through an agreement. Tehran is currently negotiating with the US and other world powers over its program as a June 30th deadline quickly approaches.

"I can, I think, demonstrate, not based on any hope but on facts and evidence and analysis, that the best way to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon is a verifiable, tough agreement," he reportedly said, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Multiple bomb threats against U.S. aircraft in the air and one on the ground in Philadelphia were made on Tuesday, according to NBC News. It was determined that the threat against the plane in Philadelphia was in fact a hoax.

The threats, five in total, were similar to chemical weapon threats against aircraft that were made last week. It was determined that the claims were fake, and there was speculation that the threats could have been made by an ISIS "lone wolf," NBC News reported.

Government sources told NBC News that none of the threats this morning are credible.

The great, bankster assault on the Ruble had failed! The wet dream of the NWO, to reduce Russia, Putin, and its masses to a groveling rabble, begging the West for mercy, has gone down in flames.

Going Mainstream

As 2015 passes by (good grief, is it nearly half over?), increasingly more folks are beginning to understand just how big the problem of market rigging by large banks truly is. The cancer of intervention and bankster rigging continues to go mainstream. Case in point: several days ago, the Bloomberg headline of half a dozen banks pleading guilty of conspiring to rig world currency markets raised alot of eyebrows.

While those of us who are stacking veterans, are all too familiar with these crimes, headlines like these are a very positive sign, and very helpful, because those headlines(if shared far and wide) do a great deal to pepper the subconscious minds of the masses with truth.

Though you and I know that the market rigging is alive and well, especially in precious metals, at times like this it's critical to remember that as powerful as these bankers are, they still fail in many instances of manipulation. To remind us of that, today I wanted to write about a case of manipulation which was recently rebuffed and defeated.

Discussing Mikheil Saakashvili's appointment as governor of Odessa, journalist Aleksandr Chalenko states that the promotion is not as absurd as might first appear. In his view, a key factor in Poroshenko's decision lies in how Saakashvili will deal with Transnistria, a breakaway Moldovan region whose stability is guaranteed by Russian peacekeepers.

"At first glance, Saakashvili's appointment by Poroshenko seems an absurdity - as something surreal," Chalenko, whose article was published in Izvestia on Sunday, notes. "Opponents of the regime in Kiev have reacted to it with jokes on Facebook, saying that now the price of ties will go up in Odessa...But nevertheless, everyone is trying to provide a more or less rational explanation for this highly strange appointment."

Noting that the arguments in favor of the appointment coming out of Ukraine are based on Saakashvili's alleged success in creating the Potemkin-villagesque 'Miracle of Batumi', Chalenko argues that "while many in the corridors of power in Ukraine believe that 'things turned out in Georgia', it's hard to believe that Saakashvili has been appointed to Odessa to turn it into a paradise."

The journalist argues that the appointment must instead be considered from a wider perspective: "The main explanation, in my view, is the fact that [the Moldovan breakaway region of] Transnistria is situated next to Odessa," Chalenko argues. "The events of the past months suggest that authorities in Ukraine and Moldova, with the support and guidance of the US, naturally, are preparing something bad for Transnistria and Novorossiya [the term used to denote the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics]."

Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said bankers who have engaged in wrongdoing should be punished, and he chided the industry for pushing back against financial regulations adopted to prevent another conflagration.

"Individuals should be punished for any misconduct they personally engaged in," Fischer said in a speech to bankers Monday in Toronto. While massive fines are being imposed on banks, "one does not see the individuals who were responsible for some of the worst aspects of bank behavior, for example in the Libor and foreign-exchange scandals, being punished severely."

Some of the world's biggest banks, including Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Barclays Plc, have agreed to pay more than $10 billion to U.S., U.K. and Swiss authorities to settle probes into rigging of foreign-exchange rates.

Greece plans to sign a document on political support for Gazprom's Turkish Stream project at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, its Energy Minister announced on Monday. The country plans to invest $2 billion in its construction.

A memorandum on political support for the gas pipeline project will be prepared by June 18-20, when the International Economic Forum (SPIEF-2015) will be held in Russia's St. Petersburg, Greek Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis announced on Monday.

"Right there we will try to sign an agreement, a so-called 'memorandum' on the political support of the said gas pipeline between Greece and Russia," the minister said, as quoted by TASS. Greece "will be proactively drafting a document," the official added.

"We will have a very strong (military) presence, very strong continued posture throughout the region to back our commitments to our allies, to protect and work with our partners and to continue ensuring peace and stability in the region, as well as back our diplomacy vis-à-vis China on the South China Sea". -David Shear, US Department of Defense's Assistant Secretary for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs.

Indian President Modi "seals $22 billion of deals on China visit . . . China had already promised $20 billion of infrastructure investment during (Chinese President) Xi's visit to India last year". - Financial Times (5/18/165, p. 4)

Introduction

The highly influential Council on Foreign Relations recently published a Special Report entitled, "Revising US Grand Strategy toward China", (Council on Foreign Relations Press: NY 2015), co-authored by two of its Senior Fellows, Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis ('B and T'), which proposes a re-orientation of US policy toward China. The Report a policy for buttressing 'US primacy in Asia' and countering what they describe as "the dangers that China's geo-economic and military power pose to US national interests in Asia and globally". The Report concludes by listing seven recommendations that Washington should follow to re-assert regional primacy.

This essay begins by discussing the basic fallacies underpinning the Report, including outdated and dangerous presumptions about US power and presence in Asia today, and the authors' incoherent, contradictory and unrealistic prescriptions.

The de facto hasbara alliance between the New York Times and the Israeli government just made a blunder, revealing complicity and ineptness on both their parts.

Yesterday we jumped on the staggering service that the New York Times had performed for the Israeli government, when the paper published a front-page article saying Israel has solved its water issues — without mentioning that much of that water is taken from Palestinians, whose use of water is highly restricted.

Well, it didn't take long for the Israeli Embassy to tweet the image above. Mission accomplished! As we observed recently, the Times has evidently made an editorial decision to be a weapon for Israel in the hasbara wars — "hasbara" is Hebrew for propaganda.

And it didn't take long for the New York Times to tweet an image for the story either: of young men in a pool.
Just one problem. That pool is not in Israel. It's in the occupied West Bank, and it's Palestinian. According to the Times's own caption on the Uriel Sinai photo in its slideshow:

Palestinians swam in spring water at Ein Mabu'a in the West Bank. Israel, which shares an aquifer with the West Bank, says it provides the Palestinians with more water than it is obliged to under the existing peace accords. The Palestinians say it is not enough and too expensive. A new era of water generosity could help foster relations with the Palestinians and with Jordan.

Recently we heard that the Australian government plans on destroying and burning protected remnant old growth forests to make electricity and woodchips; and before that we discovered the US government's open secret of founding and supporting ISIL in Syria after failing to gather public support for a war against Assad! Every day we have been watching the Palm-Oil Mafia commit industrial scale ecocide on all our remaining tropical forests in Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Brazil etc; We have all been witness to that blatant event where the USA has instigated a NAZI coup d'etat against the duly elected government of the Ukraine while blaming Russia for destabilising its own front doorstep. For decades now we have watched the Zionists continue to freely torture and commit gradual genocide against the ethnic Palestinian populations with the support and complicity of the USA and its vassals.

What, besides their blatant cruelty, ruthlessness, irrationality and affront to our humanity do these events have in common?

The answer is that they are all products of classic psychopathic behaviour, or if you like: psychopaths have initiated all these actions; Psychopaths in places of critical decision-making; Psychopaths in high places.

At 5% of the population, there are AT LEAST 16 Million psychopaths in the USA alone -- most are, at first, effectively clinically undetectable from the main population. The few, who are incarcerated in institutions, and available as clinical objects of study, represent the "failed" psychopath -- the one who has been "found out" by the system. Most have not only gotten away with their pernicious and predatory tactics on humanity and the planet, but have actually prospered in power, money and position.

The true effect of 16 million psychopaths on US society, its structures, dynamics and even its goals appears to be lost in the dense forest of competition, chaos and sophistry that continually surrounds us on a massive scale. But this brings us to my point: It's in fact this "dense forest" of competition, chaos, sophistry and ultimately destruction that is the TRUE EFFECT of the psychopath and provides his "home" environment and his selectively nurturing matrix; in reality, a perverse, self-generating mental ecosystem.

Allow me to extrapolate this issue from an even more forthright perspective? ALL of the primary structures, processes and objectives of our societies that have evolved through history have arisen insidiously and opportunistically from the minds of psychopaths and they all overwhelmingly favour and support their behavioural characteristics and tactics.

This leaves the non-psychopathic or empathetically developing members of society with few choices:

to move towards the edges of the psychopathically compromised society and attempt to develop an authentically human existence of creativity, mutuality and prosperity;

or to criticise and act against every perpetrated psychopathic injustice while trying to tweak the morality of the system;

or to simply continue to tolerate and compromise, mimicking a sufficient number of the psychopath's tactics and behaviours to survive in the competitive environment then trying to offset this affront to conscience by practicing gestures of mutuality with family, friends and neighbours.

These choices and their dynamics have produced the patterns of behaviour between psychopaths and their host communities for millennia. Fortunately there may be other alternatives.

The US' decision to beef up its military presence in southern Spain indicates that a new strategy towards Africa is well underway.

Washington just clinched a deal with Madrid that will see it boosting its military footprint in the south of the country. According to the agreement, up to 2,200 Marines and possibly 40 military aircraft will be deployed within striking distance of all of West Africa, and this massive amount of firepower proves that the US is preparing its forces for engagement all across the continent in the years to come. Its deployment along the African periphery in Spain complements the existing presence it has in Italy and Djibouti, to say nothing of its mobile naval capabilities, and this arrangement may actually be the most 'efficient' of AFRICOM's speculated formations. In the short term, it's predicted that the US' latest moves are in anticipation of an inevitable leadership transition that may soon take place in Algeria, while the constant, long-term interest is in controlling the transit of significant non-Russian gas supplies to the EU.

What's at Stake for Spain

Spain's collaboration is motivated by financial and political interests, but Madrid's short-sighted thinking may inadvertently destabilize the domestic situation in the country and open it up to terrorist attacks.

Interests:

Spain's elite has learned a lot by observing their Polish peers, and they realized that they can reap specific benefits by being America's regional doormat. Inviting the US to use the country as a launching pad for neo-colonizing Africa is supposed to raise its prestige in the eyes of American decision makers, who could then lobby their European (specifically German) underlings to lessen the painful austerity measures they've forced upon Spain. If the US could command the EU to enact self-inflicting damage with their anti-Russian sanctions, then there's no question they could also order it to relieve their pressure on Madrid as a political reward to their proxy.


Another benefit that Spain's leaders want to receive from the US is unwavering support against the Catalonian independence movement. Spain wants to scare the US into falling for a 21^st-century 'domino theory' in order to anchor its Atlantic ally's unconditional support for the government, arguing that the independence of Catalonia could lead to a chain reaction of similar movements in Spain's other regions that would eventually wipe the once-unified country off the map, and with it, America's new springboard to West Africa. It wouldn't be a surprise if it further embellishes the fear mongering by hinting that the 'Catalonian contagion' could spread throughout the rest of the EU and endanger the US' other bases, too.