Russia will contribute to building "a whole new nuclear power industry" in Egypt, President Vladimir Putin has announced as the two countries have signed a number of agreements after a meeting in Cairo.

The leaders of Russia and Egypt have signed "a memorandum of understanding to build the first nuclear plant in [the northern city of] El-Dabaa," Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al Sisi has told reporters at a news conference at Cairo's Al Qubba presidential palace.

Russia would contribute not only to the construction of a nuclear power plant, but also staff and scientific research, President Putin said.

"We discussed today the possibility of cooperation in nuclear power engineering," Putin said. "If final decisions are made, they will relate not only to the construction of a nuclear power plant but also to the creation of a whole new nuclear power industry in Egypt."

If successful, the project could cover the Egypt's necessity for electric energy, Sisi said.

"Russia has a significant experience that it could share with Cairo, and for that Egypt would be very thankful," he said. "Also, [a nuclear plant] will cover the Egypt's necessity for electricity."

Precedents exist for requiring citizens to produce special ID for domestic travel; they include Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa and Russia (both Imperial and Soviet).

Over the Christmas season, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) quietly announced that America was walking down that path. By 2016, all domestic air travel will require either a traditional passport or a federally-compliant ID card called "Real ID." State driver's licenses will no longer allow Americans access to domestic flights, as they do now. Real ID will constitute an internal passport. (The drop-date date is commonly reported as January.)

An internal passport refers to an identity document that people must produce to move from place to place within national borders. It allows a government to monitor the movement of its own people and to control that movement by granting or denying ID. In the past, governments have used internal passports to isolate 'undesirables', to regulate economic opportunities, to reap personal data, to intimidate and command obedience, and to segregate categories of people (like Jews) for political purposes. It allows a government to bind anyone it chooses to his or her place of birth.

The upcoming Real ID requirement targets only air travel. But that's how it begins - with airports.

The following photographs show, as ILWU International President Bob McEllrath said in a recent news release, that there are acres of asphalt waiting for the containers that sit on dozens of ships waiting to be unloaded at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and sufficient space for thousands of containers on the docks.

The PMA has told the media that the ports are too full to receive cargo, but the photos tell another story. And though the docks are clear, the transportation chain (intermodal squeeze from export energy trains and chassis shortage) remains congested due to factors outside of the scope of the ILWU.

Photos taken Saturday, Feb. 6, 2015, at LB 94 and LBCT, by a team of longshore workers: Pilot Rollo Hartstrom from Local 13, and photographer Bill Kirk from Local 94

Chief among the stated reasons the United States has decided to arbitrate the future of Ukraine for its citizens, is the grave danger Russia allegedly poses not only to Kiev, but to Europe and the rest of the world. This despite the fact that it was the US which facilitated violent protests that eventually overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in 2013-2014 in the first place, leading directly to the war now unfolding in the heart of Eastern Europe.

It was not long ago that another ambitious power cited Russia as a threat and invoked "collective defense" to justify what would become a contest between nations leaving tens of millions dead and entire countries in ruins. Nazi Germany's leader, Adolf Hitler would claim regarding his decision to invade Russia that:

The purpose of this front is no longer the protection of the individual nations, but rather the safety of Europe, and therefore the salvation of everyone.

I have therefore decided today once again to put the fate of Germany and the future of the German Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers.

Sounding eerily familiar are US and NATO justifications for their continued expansion east and escalations made against Russia today. And also like that other ambitious power, the United States has waged wars all across the planet, far from Russia's borders and with little to do with Russia's interests beyond its borders, long before it turned its sights on Moscow.

Since World War II, the United States has invaded, bombed, and/or occupied the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Some of these nations have been attacked by the US more than once. In many more countries the US has facilitated the violent overthrow of various governments, particularly in South America and the Middle East, first through the use of its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then through more veiled organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It has troops stationed in over a hundred nations around the world, occupying hundreds of military installations.

• Kiev Forces was Tactical Surrounded because of Artful Strategy
• The Teachers of Ukrainian Media-Victory Builders was Caught
• Kiev Introduce a Border Regime with DPR and LPR
• CNN: Obama Considers Arming pro-US Troops in Ukraine

NBC-TV's star news-anchor Brian Williams got caught repeatedly lying and fabricating his fake-'courageous' personal involvement in news stories that he had 'reported.' At LinkedIn, Rob Wyse headlined recently, "Brian Williams Essentially Lied on His Resume, Or Exaggerated The Truth," and he noted there:

Whether you call it a lie, or an exaggeration - it is a breach of trust. And that is what is looming over Brian Williams. A breach of his public trust. He is a trusted figure in our society. Perhaps the position of news anchor does not hold the same vaulted [he meant vaunted] esteem and prestige as in the days of Edward R. Murrow, or Walter Cronkite - but nonetheless, Williams is in a position of responsibility and trust. And when trust is broken, you almost never gain it back.

Most of the (thus far) 507 reader comments to that post are negative toward the post. A typical one was: "Rather silly article...he has a resume that needs no padding. So therefore this posting shows very clearly the completely misguiding value system the 'press' and the writer of this post has. Don't be the problem."

Another: "To paraphrase Tom Brady, nobody had died over this."

Another: "Big Deal, everyone pads their Resume."

U.S. provision of military aid to Ukraine would be seen by Moscow as a declaration of war and spark a global escalation of Ukraine's separatist conflict, Russian defense analysts said.

With Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine seizing new territory from the Ukrainian army, voices in Washington are demanding that Kiev be given defensive weapons and hardware - including lethal equipment - to hold the line.

But if such aid were sent, "Russia would reasonably consider the U.S. to be a direct participant in the conflict," said Evgeny Buzhinsky, a military expert at the Moscow-based PIR Center.

Speaking to The Moscow Times on a condition of anonymity, a member of the Russian Defense Ministry's public advisory board warned that Moscow would not only up the ante in eastern Ukraine, "but also respond asymmetrically against Washington or its allies on other fronts."

The barbarous phenomenon we recently witnessed in France has roots that go back to at least 1979 when the mujahedeen made their appearance in Afghanistan. At that time their ire was directed at the leftist Taraki government that had come into power in April of 1978. This government's ascension to power was a sudden and totally indigenous happening - with equal surprise to both the USA and the USSR.

In April of 1978 the Afghan army deposed the country's government because of its oppressive measures, and then created a new government, headed by a leftist, Nur Mohammad Taraki, who had been a writer, poet and professor of journalism at the University of Kabul. Following this, for a brief period of time, Afghanistan had a progressive secular government, with broad popular support. As I pointed out in an earlier publication, this government ". . . enacted progressive reforms and gave equal rights to women. It was in the process of dragging the country into the 20th century, and as British political scientist Fred Halliday stated in May 1979¹, 'probably more has changed in the countryside over the last year than in two centuries since the state was established.'"

The Taraki government's first course of action was to declare non-alignment in foreign affairs and to affirm a commitment to Islam within a secular state. Among the much needed reforms, women were given equal rights, and girls were to go to school and be in the same classroom as boys. Child marriages and feudal dowry payments were banned. Labour unions were legalized, and some 10,000 people were released from prisons. Within a short time hundreds of schools and medical clinics were built in the countryside.

The landholding system hadn't changed much since the feudal period; more than three-quarters of the land was owned by landlords who composed only 3 percent of the rural population. Reforms began on September 1, 1978 by the abolition all debts owed by farmers - landlords and moneylenders had charged up to 45 percent interest. A program was being developed for major land reform, and it was expected that all farm families (including landlords) would be given the equivalent of equal amounts of land.²

What happened to this progressive government? In brief, it was undermined by the CIA and the mujahedeen, which triggered a series of events that destroyed the country - and ironically led to the disaster of September 11, 2001 in the USA and to the present chaos and tragedy in Afghanistan.

A military judge halted a hearing at Guantanamo Bay on Monday when two detainees being tried in connection with the September 11 terror attacks said they recognized their translator from a secret CIA prison where they were formerly held.

Moments into the proceedings - the first hearing in six months - Army Col. James L. Pohl recessed court after one defendant, then another, objected to their English-to-Arabic translator, journalists reported from Gitmo.

"The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there," defendant Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh said soon after Monday morning's hearing began, according to the Miami Herald.

Once Al-Shibh made the allegation, an attorney for co-defendant Walid bin Attash said her client was "visibly shaken" upon seeing the man during Monday's proceedings and raised the same objection.

"My client relayed to me this morning that there is somebody in this courtroom who was participating in his illegal torture," attorney Cheryl Bormann told Col. Pohl, according to Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg.

Monday's hearing was the first for the Gitmo detainees since proceedings took a pause in August, and the first since the Senate Intelligence Committee released an executive summary of its years-in-the-making report on the CIA's use of torture in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Shibh, 42, and Attash, 36, were captured in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and held by the CIA at a secret prison until being transferred to Gitmo in 2006.

Both detainees appear in last year's Senate report as being victims of harsh interrogation techniques deployed by US investigators in an effort to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorists. According to the Senate's analysis, US efforts to coerce detainees into providing information to authorities through torture proved to be largely unsuccessful.

Manipulation takes many forms, and aims at us from multiple levels. Emotions, inattention, preoccupation, distraction, lack of information, misinformation, and levels of trust all aid in the success of manipulation-craft bewitchment. The systems and techniques, utilized to manipulate and deceive, are known and tried. They are natural systems experienced in society and the psychological functions of reality. When used with the intent to beguile they become manipulation-crafts. Below are a few examples of techniques and mechanisms you face. Knowing them and recognizing the process is key to your understanding and freewill.

Hegelian Dialectic

For every idea or (Thesis) there would be an opposite idea or (Antithesis). The resulting conflict between the two leads to a combination of the two or (Synthesis). The Synthesis then becomes the new Thesis and the cycle continues.

This process can be observed with any meeting of the minds throughout time. However, if both parts of the equation are under the direction of the same architect, the resulting synthesis is a structure of intended design. Utilizing the Hegelian Dialectic as manipulation-craft is detrimental to a free society. It makes the political and democratic processes inept.