Impunity for Israeli war crimes encourages more gross violations of international law. Palestine's application to the International Criminal Court is a welcome step toward accountability.
Where, in this post 9/11 world, are war criminals to be held accountable?

Not in the United States, where a Senate report on CIA torture has failed to indict the initiators and implementers, despite "harsh interrogation" techniques that included sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, rectal feeding (rape) and waterboarding, and where the painful force-feeding of hunger strikers at the Guantánamo prison continues unabated.

Not in Israel, where its indiscriminate attacks on UN schools, public buildings and private residences in Gaza last July killed more than 1,500 civilians (including 500 children), and where the country's leaders have justified such carnage as an appropriate response to Hamas rockets that killed five Israeli civilians (including one child).

So it's not surprising that both the United States and Israel have condemned Palestine's decision to join the International Criminal Court (as the 123rd member) and deplore the recent decision of the ICC prosecutor to investigate possible war crimes by both Israel and Palestinian members of Hamas.

According to The New York Times of January 17, the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called the action of the court's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, "inflammatory" and said he would oppose Israeli cooperation with the inquiry and would call for disbandment of the court. The US State Department weighed in on the side of Israel, arguing that since the Palestinians do not have their own state they were ineligible to join the court.

Recognizing Palestine as a state, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on November 29, 2012, to accord Palestine "non-member observer status in the UN." Only the United States and eight other governments voted against it. As a UN observer state, Palestine signed the Rome Statute on January 1, 2015, a day after a UN resolution mandating Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank failed to pass at the Security Council. As a result, Palestine will formally become a member of the ICC on April 1, 2015.

At least 12 civilians have been killed in a rocket attack in Donetsk, RIA Novosti reported, citing Donetsk People's Republic officials. Ukraine's military has blamed the separatists for the attack, calling it an attempt to undermine Minsk peace talks.

Two civilians were killed at a trolleybus stop, and five others died while waiting in a line for humanitarian aid. Five more people died in the Azotnoye district of the city.


The Donetsk People's Republic Defense Ministry claims the attack was carried out from nearby residential area which is according to them "a neutral zone located to the north of Donetsk Airport." The spokesman says "the Ukrainian forces approach, attack and then step back to their positions."

The humanitarian headquarters has stopped aid distribution across Donetsk in order to keep locals and volunteers safe.

On January 24, a residential area in the port city of Mariupol came under fire, killing 30 people and injuring 100.

On January 22, 15 people were killed when shells hit a trolleybus stop in Donetsk.

On Monday, Kiev announced a state of emergency in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and put other Ukrainian regions on high alert.

On Friday, talks between the contact group's members on the Ukrainian conflict should have taken place in Minsk, but were canceled due to the absence of the Kiev representative, Lugansk and Donetsk representatives told RIA Novosti.

"Unfortunately, the Ukrainian side didn't join. Ukraine is still avoiding dialogue," Lugansk's Vladislav Deinego said.

One of the more fanciful, or thought to be fanciful, topics I've been covering for a good while now is the subject of the relationship of the CIA to Hollywood.

Recent blockbusters like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper focus on the military and intelligence agencies in supposed "based on true events" scenarios, but is more at work here? The film industry has always loved tales of espionage, but in reality, the creation and manufacturing of a completely alternate reality and history is far more extensive than most would assume.

While many films have nobly challenged assumptions about war in figures like Kubrick or Stone, for the most part, film has functioned as one of the most powerful forms of propaganda in the western establishment's arsenal.

Watching some old G.I. Joe cartoon episodes for an upcoming analysis, I was not surprised to find Harvard psychological consultants as part of the production of the show, as reaching the youth with propaganda is central to creating cubicle dwelling automatons later in life. Likewise, researching this as a thesis topic was also instrumental in making these connections, as was the mass of information in Peter Levenda's Sinister Forces trilogy. More recently, a plethora of news articles have surfaced that highlight this deep relationship, as this rabbit hole never ends. The coalescing of intelligence agencies, secret societies and Hollywood in reality is more sensational than any incestuous cult a pulp crime fiction writer could dream up.

Author John Rizzo has recently published a book titled, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA, which is an amazing admission of this scandalous affair between intelligence and the film industry. The L.A. Times comments:

"The CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers - studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors," John Rizzo, the former acting CIA general counsel, wrote in his new book, Company Man: Thirty Years of Crisis and Controversy in the CIA...

The CIA also recruits actors to give more visibility to propaganda projects abroad, such as a documentary secretly produced by the agency, Rizzo said. And the agency sometimes takes advantage of the door-opening cachet that movie stars and other American celebrities enjoy. A star who met a world leader, for example, might be asked for details about that meeting.

US claims to be waging war against "Islamic State" whose various "al-Baghdadi" leaders do not exist.

In 2007, the New York Times revealed that long-vilified "Islamic State" leader Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi did not exist, and that the creation of this fictional character was a ruse to obfuscate the role of foreigners in the creation and perpetuation of "Al Qaeda in Iraq."

Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.In an article titled, "Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says," the NYT reports.

The NYT would also reveal the purpose of the deception:

The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization.

The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.

The admission by US military leaders, reported in the NYT, reveals that the so-called "Islamic State" was nothing more than an appendage of Al Qaeda - with Al Qaeda itself directly armed, funded, and backed by stalwart US allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Despite the NYT and the Pentagon's admissions, the entire ruse has continued, on an exponential scale.

Yanis Varoufakis, widely tipped to be Syriza's new finance minister, tells Paul Mason what they would do if they get into government in Greece, and admits the prospect of power in Europe is "scary".

"Get out of here, you low-life scum," Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) said to demonstrators who interrupted a congressional hearing in Washington on Thursday. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was scheduled to speak at the hearing.

C-SPAN was broadcasting the morning hearing of the United States Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by McCain, and caught the senior lawmaker live on camera as he verbally unloaded on protesters from the DC-based group Code Pink.

Kissinger, who is best known for his role in the administration of President Richard Nixon during the height of the Vietnam War, encountered jeers from the protesters as soon as he entered the Senate chamber.

The US is constructing a global system of bilateral and multilateral alliances to assist it in more efficiently projecting power throughout the 21st century. As the world moves towards multipolarity, the US is prepared to exploit this trend to its geopolitical advantage.

Instead of 'going it alone' as Bush was prone to do, the US is now finding ways to get others to do its dirty work by convincing its 'partners' that they have a shared interest in doing so. During the 2011 War on Libya, France and the UK took the helm while the US, as it was described, "Led From Behind". A New York Times editorial at the time defined this as "discreet US military assistance with [others] doing the trumpeting". Four years later, this concept has grown out of its Libyan test tube and gone global, with the US setting up similar alliance systems all throughout the world in order to indirectly project its will in key regions. As the cynical saying goes, "Why do for yourself what others can do for you?"

'Friends' Across The World

Let's take a look at the US' Lead From Behind (LFB) partners, beginning from the Western Hemisphere and moving eastward:

Latin America:

The US works closely with the Pacific Alliance, a neo-liberal economic trading group composed of close allies Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. Their shared goal is to counter the leftist economic vision emanating from Venezuela and to dismantle its geopolitical resistance network of Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The end result is to surround and contain Brazil in case it ever decides to seriously counter the US' influence.

As Japanese exporters enjoy an earnings boost from the weakened yen, their rivals in South Korea are struggling with a stronger won. Hyundai Motor's net income fell 14 percent in 2014, the biggest decline since 2008. The automaker's subsidiary, Kia Motors, suffered a 22 percent drop in profits, with earnings in the fourth quarter collapsing 54 percent. The picture isn't bright for Korean retailers, either. Consumers are spending less at department stores Lotte Shopping and Shinsegae.

The bad results are adding to worries that the South Korean economy may soon stumble into a Japan-style deflationary trap. Consumer prices rose just 0.8 percent in December compared with a year earlier, and Samsung Securities expects prices in 2015 to rise less than 1 percent. From last October to December, the economy grew 0.4 percent over the previous quarter, and domestic demand contracted 0.6 percent. "Korea's economic momentum faded quickly at the end of last year," Mark Walton, a senior economist with BNP Paribas, wrote in a Jan. 27 report. "The breadth of the slowdown hints at a deep-seated malaise."

Did you ever think about what your life would be like if the stores were closed? I'm not talking about a post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario or a winter storm that clears the shelves. I'm talking about a long-term disruption of services caused by an economic collapse.

What if you couldn't run to Wal-Mart to get soap? What if the grocery store had supplies so limited that they were rationed out to people in such small amounts that the food you got was not enough to meet your needs? What if there were no diapers for your baby or aspirin to cure a headache?

This is exactly what happens in a serious economic collapse. It happened a couple of years ago in Greece, and it's happening right now in Venezuela. Bloomberg.com reports a scene of desperation:

Long lines, some stretching for blocks, formed outside grocery stores in the South American country's capital as residents search for scarce basic items such as detergent and chicken.

"I've visited six stores already today looking for detergent - I can't find it anywhere," said Lisbeth Elsa, a 27-year-old janitor, waiting in line outside a supermarket in eastern Caracas. "We're wearing our dirty clothes again because we can't find it. At this point I'll buy whatever I can find."

European Union foreign ministers extended existing sanctions against Russia on Thursday, holding off on tighter economic measures for now but winning the support of the new left-leaning government of Greece, whose position had been in doubt.

The ministers agreed to extend until September travel bans and asset freezes imposed last year that had been due to expire. They also agreed to list the names of additional people who could be targeted with sanctions when they meet again on Feb. 9.

They dropped language, however, about drawing up "further restrictive measures" that had appeared in a pre-meeting draft. The bloc's foreign policy chief said a decision on such measures would be left to EU leaders meeting next month.