Iran is stopping mutual settlements in dollars with foreign countries and agreements on bilateral swap in new currencies will be signed in the near future, the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has said.

"In trade exchanges with foreign countries, Iran uses other currencies, including Chinese yuan, euro, Turkish lira, Russian ruble and South Korean won," Gholamali Kamyab, CBI deputy head, told the Tasnim state news agency.

He added that Iran is considering the possibility of signing bilateral monetary agreements with several countries on the use of other currencies.

Kamyab believes bilateral currency swap agreements will ease trade and economic transactions between Iran and other states.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the global economy the past years can agree with me our central bankers have conducted miserable monetary policy and have taken the insufficient measures to fight crises. All major economies have embarked in printing unprecedented quantities of money, but the only thing they bought was time. Quantitative easing on such a scale is like kicking the can determined to reach the end of the road. The future looks anything but sanguine.

Where is this going? Are our leaders truly gonna allow for the international monetary system to implode? Is there no plan B? And we are supposed to believe gold isn't of any significance in economics?

In our current highly unstable economic environment the price of gold is relatively low, according to gold proponents like me. In addition, we can see immense flows of physical gold going from West to East that are guaranteed not to return in the foreseeable future. If the price of gold isn't suppressed, my previous two observations can only be explained as physical supply outstripping demand since April 2013 - when the price of gold declined substantially to its current relative low levels. But perhaps there is more than meets the eye.

The British government began a historic transfer of powers to Scotland on Thursday, keeping a pledge it had given to persuade Scots to reject independence as renewed nationalist support surges.

The draft bill, to be enacted after a general election on May 7, will further dismantle Britain's highly centralized system of government, a move critics fear could trigger the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom.

It has already spurred demands from some politicians for similar moves in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, teeing up political uncertainty and heralding an eventual redistribution of power in the world's sixth largest economy.

Are 'Islamic' terrorists in the Balkan region threatening the freedom of the EU?

The European Union is concerned about efforts by Islamist terrorist groups to seize the western Balkans as a springboard for action in the EU. The EU is planning closer cooperation with the countries from the region and tougher controls at border crossings.

One preliminary question to ask might be; how did any such 'Islamic' terrorists wind up in the Balkans in the first place?

Having trained and armed their terror brigades to fight the 'Soviet invaders' during the Afghan-Soviet war, the U.S. was so pleased by their efforts that they expanded their field of operation.

In the wake of the Cold War, the CIA continued to support the Islamic brigades out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans and south East Asia.

As the FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds revealed, the Balkan region, along with Central Asia and the Caucasus, was turned into one of the main fields of operations for 'Gladio B' - that is, using jihadist mercenaries as foot soldiers for the Western empire. So if you hear about terrorists operating out of some location, it's a safe bet that they were put there by our leaders.

While we have no evidence that these alleged terrorists are presently using the Balkans as a springboard for further terror activity in the EU, we do have evidence that the U.S. is doing so. An article that appeared in the Telegraph notes that the U.S., along with Britain and other European states, is shipping weapons to rebels terrorists in Syria - via Zagreb, Croatia.

California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock said on Thursday that the minimum wage should not be raised because low pay was necessary for minorities and other unskilled workers who were not worth more than $7 an hour.


During an appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, host Greta Brawner asked McClintock if he could get behind a presidential candidate like Mitt Romney, who is one of an increasing number of Republicans saying that the minimum wage should be at least $10.10 an hour.

But McClintock argued that raising the minimum wage would "rip the first rung in the ladder of opportunity for teenagers, for minorities, for people who are trying to get into the job market for their first job."


The California Republican explained that the minimum wage was not supposed to be a living wage that could support families.

"It's not supposed to support a family. The minimum wage is that first job when you have no skills, no experience, no working history. That's how you get into the job market, that's how you develop that experience, develop that work record, get your first raise, then your next raise, then your promotion."


McClintock continued: "If your labor is an unskilled person just entering the workforce is worth say $7 an hour at a job and the minimum wage is $10, you have just been made permanently unemployable. That first rung of the economic ladder has been ripped out and you can't get on it. That is a tragedy."

The scale of the events in France and the intensity of the ensuing panic turned out to be so massive that even the most politically unprepared people realized that the stability of EU is facing an enormous threat. And it doesn't even matter if the French authorities are successful in neutralizing the current situation - it may repeat on a much larger scale. It is impossible to stop this process within the framework of the modern "tolerant democracy" - placing well armed professional security units in front of every building in every city is simply not an option and everything else would be ineffective. An honest assessment of risks associated with similar events, even just in terms of insurance claims, will show that the entire economy is at risk of going down the drain. And I am talking about world-wide economy. Since I have written here a forecast that, among other things, contains some information about year 2015, I am obliged to add some commentary. The first question that begs an answer is: who stands to profit?

Here I will simply list possible beneficiaries. First choice - the US. The authorities in that country realized that the influence of opposition elites (the ones I wrote about in my forecast) is increasing so much that it is not only jeopardizing the agreements around the Trans Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA), but also becoming a threat to the pro-American elites' hold on power in Europe. Orban in Hungary, Zeman in Czech Republic, Marin Le Pen in France... All of these represent very negative processes for the US. Therefore, the situation must be blown up, "democracy" must be tucked away and a strict dictatorship must be established. A pro-American dictatorship that is, which will thoughtlessly follow orders from Washington without the need to engage in any kind of "democratic" procedures. In other words, install "pinochets" in every EU country complete with all the "bells and whistles" that always accompany these types of regimes: "death squadrons", rollback of all social security standards, removal of state regulations - that is total liberalization. And, of course, along with these developments a free trade area with the US will be established. By the way, the refusal by French authorities to allow "Front populaire" to participate in the "unity march" fits the above scenario very neatly - what kind of "democracy" and "unity" is this when a quarter of the native French (!) population is being rudely shoved aside.


I also would like to note that within the US elite there are several groups each of them having their own channels which could be used to stimulate and organize terrorist attacks that will fit their agenda. Each group has their own partners (British Windsors, world financial elites, China and many others), as well as their own interests, and all of this requires a very detailed and thorough analysis.

The United Nations has condemned Israel for flying unmanned drones over the ceasefire line inside Syria, before an airstrike killed senior Hezbollah commanders and an Iranian general on Sunday.

This comes after an air raid allegedly carried out by Israel killed six members of Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah group as well as a senior commander of Iran's revolutionary guards' corps (IRGC), Mohammad Ali Allahdadi (or Dadi).

The airstrike took place in Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, when it hit a convoy carrying Jihad Moughniyah, son of Imad Moughniyah ( who was slain in a 2008 bombing, which was also blamed on Israel) and commander Mohamad Issa, according to a statement issued by Hezbollah.

Under President George W. Bush, the White House urged reporters to withhold accounts about many of the most contentious aspects in the war on terrorism: the existence of a secret prison in Thailand, the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation and detention program, warrantless wiretapping and government monitoring of financial transactions.

The Obama administration has persuaded reporters to delay publishing the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia, the name of a country in which a drone strike against an American citizen was being considered, the fact that a diplomat arrested in Pakistan was a C.I.A. officer and that an American businessman was working for the agency when he disappeared in Iran.

- From the New York Times article: "Condoleezza Rice Testifies on Urging The Times to Not Run Article"

The timidness with which mainstream media in the U.S. approaches news has been well documented. In fact, the inability of traditional media to do a reasonable job of holding powerful interests accountable has been one of the primary drivers behind the ascendency of alternative news. Despite this reality, one thing we know less about is specifically how the power structure goes about suppressing news it doesn't want reaching the plebs. Until now.

Selma artistically documents activists' strategic work to realize basic human rights already legally guaranteed under the US Constitution: voting and freedom of speech.

Activism was required after government "leaders'" ongoing rejection of their Oath of office to protect and defend the US Constitution, and psychopathically attacking activists for "disturbing the peace."

The movie has FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover advise US President Johnson that Dr. King is a "degenerate immoral animal" who the FBI could simply assassinate.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the powerful U.S. ally who joined Washington's fight against al-Qaida and sought to modernize the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom with incremental but significant reforms, including nudging open greater opportunities for women, has died, according to Saudi state TV. He was 90.

More than his guarded and hidebound predecessors, Abdullah assertively threw his oil-rich nation's weight behind trying to shape the Middle East. His priority was to counter the influence of rival, mainly Shiite Iran wherever it tried to make advances. He and fellow Sunni Arab monarchs also staunchly opposed the Middle East's wave of pro-democracy uprisings, seeing them as a threat to stability and their own rule.

He backed Sunni Muslim factions against Tehran's allies in several countries, but in Lebanon for example, the policy failed to stop Iranian-backed Hezbollah from gaining the upper hand. And Tehran and Riyadh's colliding ambitions stoked proxy conflicts around the region that enflamed Sunni-Shiite hatreds - most horrifically in Syria's civil war, where the two countries backed opposing sides. Those conflicts in turn hiked Sunni militancy that returned to threaten Saudi Arabia.