Two young children in Pennsylvania were banned from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives under a gag order imposed under a settlement reached by their parents with a leading oil and gas company.

The sweeping gag order was imposed under a $750,000 settlement between the Hallowich family and Range Resources Corp, a leading oil and gas driller. It provoked outrage on Monday among environmental campaigners and free speech advocates.

The settlement, reached in 2011 but unsealed only last week, barred the Hallowichs' son and daughter, who were then aged ten and seven, from ever discussing fracking or the Marcellus Shale, a leading producer in America's shale gas boom.

The EU's reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking -- jeopardizing Germany's touted energy revolution in the process.

The climate between Brussels and Berlin is polluted, something European Commission officials attribute, among other things, to the "reckless" way German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked stricter exhaust emissions during her re-election campaign to placate domestic automotive manufacturers like Daimler and BMW. This kind of blatant self-interest, officials complained at the time, is poisoning the climate.

But now it seems that the climate is no longer of much importance to the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, either. Commission sources have long been hinting that the body intends to move away from ambitious climate protection goals. On Tuesday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported as much.

At the request of Commission President José Manuel Barroso, EU member states are no longer to receive specific guidelines for the development of renewable energy. The stated aim of increasing the share of green energy across the EU to up to 27 percent will hold. But how seriously countries tackle this project will no longer be regulated within the plan. As of 2020 at the latest -- when the current commitment to further increase the share of green energy expires -- climate protection in the EU will apparently be pursued on a voluntary basis.

© Leon Neal/AFP/Getty ImagesAre the hundreds of peaceful protesters who blockaded the Cuadrilla oil drilling site outside Balcombe, West Sussex, dangerous "extremists"?

From North America to Europe, the 'national security' apparatus is being bought off by Big Oil to rout peaceful activism

Over the last year, a mass of shocking evidence has emerged on the close ties between Western government spy agencies and giant energy companies, and their mutual interests in criminalising anti-fracking activists.

Activists tarred with the same brush

In late 2013, official documents obtained under freedom of information showed that Canada's domestic spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), had ramped up its surveillance of activists opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline project on 'national security' grounds. The CSIS also routinely passed information about such groups to the project's corporate architect, Calgary-based energy company, Enbridge.

The Northern Gateway is an $8 billion project to transport oil from the Alberta tar sands to the British Columbia coast, where it can be shipped to global markets. According to the documents a Canadian federal agency, the National Energy Board, worked with CSIS and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to coordinate with Enbridge, TransCanada, and other energy corporations in gathering intelligence on anti-fracking activists - despite senior police privately admitting they "could not detect a direct or specific criminal threat."

Now it has emerged that former cabinet minister Chuck Strahl - the man appointed by Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper to head up the CSIS' civilian oversight panel, the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) - has been lobbying for Enbridge since 2011.

But that's not all. According to CBC News, only one member of Strahl's spy watchdog committee "has no ties to either the current government or the oil industry." For instance, SIRC member Denis Losier sits on the board of directors of Enbridge-subsidiary, Enbridge NB, while Yves Fortier, is a former board member of TransCanada, the company behind the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Before anyone suggests that all Russia is focusing on is China at any and all costs, consider that as we have been saying since 2012, perhaps just as important to Russia (and China) strategically is Iran which has already lashed out against the Petrodollar on numerous occasions in the past, not only for its vast oil reserves, but for its even more strategic location in the heart of the Persian Gulf.

To be sure, the Eurasian crescent of Russia and China would be made all that much stronger if the two nations had a toehold on the Straits of Hormuz, and were able to shut traffic - either tanker or military, with the US Fifth Fleet located in Bahrain - into the Gulf at their bidding. Which is why it was not surprising that not even 24 hours after Russia and China announced the "holy grail" energy deal, that RIA reported Russia is already preparing to lock in the Tehran regime with a deal to build not one but 8 (!) more nuclear power plants in the country.

Mentally ill inmates locked up in a Miami, Florida prison are routinely tormented and abused for sport by a clique of correctional officers and staff, a former psychiatrist at the prison claims in a disturbing new report.

George Mallinckrodt worked as a psychotherapist at the Dade Correctional Institution, a facility near Miami with a capacity of 1,563 inmates, from 2008 to 2011.During that time, he said, a 50-year-old convict named Darren Rainey was pushed into an enclosed shower and forced to endure a shower of scalding hot water for more than an hour, a torturous experience that ultimately killed him.

The incident is just one example of brutality Mallinckrodt described to the Miami Herald, which has published extensive coverage of the allegations this week.

Mallinckrodt wrote a letter to the paper claiming that officers "taunted, tormented, abused, beat and tortured chronically mentally inmates on a regular basis" with the goal of infuriating the prisoners so they would react violently, thus making it possible for the guards to then punish the prisoner. The antagonism has gone on past Mallinckrodt's time at the jail, he said, with a current employee informing him of Rainey's death, which occurred on June 23, 2012.

Thailand's military seized power Thursday in a bloodless coup, dissolving the government, suspending the constitution and dispersing groups of protesters from both sides of the country's political divide who had gathered in Bangkok and raised fears of a violent showdown.

The powerful army chief, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, announced the military takeover in a statement broadcast on national television. It was followed by additional announcements including a nationwide curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. and an order for 18 government officials - including the ousted prime minister - to report immediately to the country's new governing military commission.

There was no immediate sign of soldiers patrolling central Bangkok, but troops dispersed the two protest sites where competing groups were camped out - one backing the now-ousted elected government and one that had struggled for seven months to unseat it.

Although the military has insisted it wasn't taking sides, its ousting of the elected government met the key goal of the anti-government protesters. The pro-government "Red Shirt" supporters had earlier said they would not tolerate a coup, but there were no immediate signs of resistance or reports of violence. The military provided hundreds of buses to take the protesters home.

With the China-Russia deal conducted outside the dollar system we see the beginning of the de-dollarization and de-Americanization of the world, former assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts told RT.

RT: A number of Western businesspeople have boycotted the St. Petersburg economic forum. Are they going to lose out?

Paul Craig Roberts: I think it is just a symbolic way of accommodating Washington. I don't think it means anything, I do not think the firms in Germany, for example, want to harm the relationships with Russia, nor do they want it in France. So I do not think it means much. What is much more significant is that the number of Asian countries that are coming to this forum, and energy deal signed by Russia and China, is an indication that the world will be moving away from American financial hegemony.

This large energy deal will be conducted outside the dollar system, so here is the beginning of the de-dollarization, the beginning of the de-Americanization. This is an indication that the two large countries, Russia and China, are forming a strategic alliance because they are tired of being harassed and cut out of the Western mechanisms, they are tired of the threats. So they are moving in a new direction, and they will take much of the world with them. I do not think the European countries that have strong economic relations with Russia will want to lose those.

This is a beginning of a turn from Russia toward the East. Previously Russia was focused on being accepted by the West, being accepted by the Americans. It waited for years to be allowed to join the WTO. I think this was a mistake on Russia's part because the West is not the rising part of the world. The rising part of the world is the East.

In 1944 a daring assassination attempt was made on Germany's Adolf Hitler. The plan was hatched not by Allied commanders, but amongst the ranks of the Germany army itself. In the immediate wake of the planned assassination, the Germany army was to take over cities across the country, arrest the Nazi leadership and disarm the various militant wings it assembled to protect its political machine.

The order to be distributed upon Hitler's assassination concluded by stating:

Any opposition against the military power of enforcement is to be broken ruthlessly.In this hour of highest danger for the Fatherland, unity of the Wehrmacht and the maintenance of full discipline is the uppermost requirement.

That is why I make it the duty of all commanders of the army, the navy, and the air force to support the holders of executive power to carry out their difficult task with all means at their disposal and to guarantee the compliance of their directives by the subordinate sections. The German soldier stands before a historical task. It will depend on his energy and attitude whether Germany will be saved.

Ultimately the operation was foiled and its conspirators executed for treason. In hindsight it is clear that such an operation would have stood a better chance of success if implemented before the Nazi Party gained such sweeping and deeply rooted power - a lesson to be learned by all students of history and all who oppose the accumulation and abuse of unwarranted influence.

Today, with history's lessons in clear hindsight, and with the sacrifices of those like the brave German officers who attempted to end the Nazi scourge in 1944 in mind, we cannot afford nor tolerate delaying measures to stem the rise of the next totalitarian regime, be they Neo-Nazis, crypto-Maoists, sectarian extremists, or Khmer Rouge doppelgangers. In Thailand, it is the Royal Thai Army's turn to uproot a foreign-backed regime that has steadily eroded the checks and balances of Thai society and has persistently attempted to construct militant wings to grant its increasingly autocratic and abusive political machine sweeping impunity from the rule-of-law.

The regime, led by billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, has worked in concert with special interests on Wall Street for well over a decade, groomed specifically to upturn Thailand's political order and usher in client status that will allow the nation to be integrated into a united front Wall Street plans to use to encircle, contain, and eventually absorb China with. The regime of Thaksin Shinawatra is playing a role in hegemonic ambitions that eclipse even those of Adolf Hitler - and could potentially exact a toll in both human and economic costs that exceed those of World War 2 if war is triggered across Asia.

The Royal Thai Army (RTA) has announced that it is taking over responsibility for national security from the current regime's so-called "Centre for the Administration of Peace and Order" (CAPO). The move came after nearly six months of terrorism carried out by pro-regime militants the regime itself has failed categorically to either condemn or counter with its sweeping, self-granted security powers. As recently as last Thursday, an M79 grenade attack on anti-regime protesters left 3 dead and many more maimed, including an elderly woman who lost her eye.

Additionally, stockpiles of weapons have been stumbled across by police, who in fact are loyal to the current regime. This indicates that so many weapons have been brought into Bangkok or readied elsewhere by the regime to carry out a concerted terrorist campaign, that their own police are stumbling over them by accident while on routine calls.

The U.S. State Department on Monday declined to say if Martin Wani, a 20-month-old Christian boy imprisoned by the Islamist Sudanese government, is a U.S. citizen.

"You don't know whether that little boy in prison is a U.S. citizen?" CNSNews.com asked State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki at the department's Monday press briefing.

"I don't have any more details to share," Psaki said.