China paid Ukraine $3B two years ago for grain still not delivered, now demands refund. Another $3.6B that's owed to China, will probably also default.

Russia's RIA Novosti News Agency reported, on January 17th, that China is demanding refund of $1.5 billion in cash and of an additional $1.5 billion in Chinese goods that were paid in advance by China (in 2013), for a 2012 Chinese order of grain from Ukraine, which goods still have not been supplied to China.

According to RIAN, "State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine (STATE FOOD) supplied grain in 2013, elsewhere, but not to China. The new Kiev authorities had an opportunity to fix the short-sighted actions 'of the [previous] Yanukovych regime,' and to present a positive economic image to the Chinese." But it didn't happen.

Dozens of US law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have used radar devices that allow them to "see" through walls of buildings to monitor human activity, a new report states. This has led to questions regarding how legal these tactics are.

The policing agencies began using the radar device more than two years ago without public disclosure and little notice from courts until a recent case in Colorado revealed its use to catch a parole violator, according to USA Today. The device's clandestine use has raised questions about Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted police searches.

"The idea that the government can send signals through the wall of your house to figure out what's inside is problematic," said Christopher Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Technologies that allow the police to look inside of a home are among the intrusive tools that police have."

Reminiscent of the heat-seeking extraterrestrial in the Hollywood movie 'Predator,' the device, known as the Range-R, uses radio waves to detect the exact location of movements, even breathing, from more than 50 feet away.

Turkish military says MIT shipped weapons to al-Qaeda

Secret official documents about the searching of three trucks belonging to Turkey's national intelligence service (MIT) have been leaked online, once again corroborating suspicions that Ankara has not been playing a clean game in Syria. According to the authenticated documents, the trucks were found to be transporting missiles, mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition. The Gendarmerie General Command, which authored the reports, alleged, "The trucks were carrying weapons and supplies to the al-Qaeda terror organization." But Turkish readers could not see the documents in the news bulletins and newspapers that shared them, because the government immediately obtained a court injunction banning all reporting about the affair.

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was prime minister, he had said, "You cannot stop the MIT truck. You cannot search it. You don't have the authority. These trucks were taking humanitarian assistance to Turkmens."

Since then, Erdogan and his hand-picked new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have repeated at every opportunity that the trucks were carrying assistance to Turkmens. Public prosecutor Aziz Takci, who had ordered the trucks to be searched, was removed from his post and 13 soldiers involved in the search were taken to court on charges of espionage. Their indictments call for prison terms of up to 20 years.

In scores of documents leaked by a group of hackers, the Gendarmerie Command notes that rocket warheads were found in the trucks' cargo.

While the Western world was watching and grieving over the slaughter in Paris last week, and my colleagues in the media were fomenting a meaningless debate about whether President Obama should have gone to Paris to participate in a televised parade, the feds took advantage of that diversion to reveal even more incursions into our liberties than we had known about.

We already knew that the NSA, our 60,000 domestic spies, has captured and retained the contents of nearly all emails, text messages, telephone calls, bank statements, utility bills and credit card bills of all Americans since 2009. We already knew that Obama has used CIA drones to kill Americans overseas and claims that he somehow can do so legally and secretly notwithstanding the express prohibitions in the Constitution.

We already knew that President George W. Bush authorized the illegal torture of a hundred-plus people, about 20 percent by "mistake," and now we know that because he refuses to prosecute the torturers, Obama is as culpable for the torture as Bush is.

Last week, however, the Department of Justice revealed that since the 1990s, the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose job is to interdict controlled dangerous substances before they enter our borders and to do so consistent with the Constitution, has been monitoring the phone calls of selected Americans. Prior to 2001, the DEA intimidated, coerced and bribed telecom providers into making their telephone lines available to its agents. Since 2001, it has no doubt taken advantage of the provisions of the so-called Patriot Act that permit federal agents to write their own search warrants to custodians of records, in direct contravention of the Constitution, which requires warrants from judges.

Glancing at the headlines one might believe Russian President Vladimir Putin had inappropriately decided not to attend Holocaust commemorations in Poland.

In one breathtaking display of misinformation, Reuters would report in its article Putin will not attend Holocaust commemorations in Poland that, "Sources told Reuters on Monday that Putin was unlikely to join world leaders gathering at the site of the Auschwitz death camp because distrust caused by the conflict in Ukraine has cast a pall on arrangements."

In reality, The Russian leader was never invited by Poland, the nation hosting the commemorations.

The geopolitical thrust and accompanying misinformation is designed to reinforce the perception that Russia is now a hegemonic threat, on par with Nazi Germany during World War II. Reality could not contradict this contrived narrative more.

On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa was launched. Three massive German armies moved at lightning speed into the Soviet Union as part of a long anticipated Nazi attempt to conquer Russia. The invasion would quickly overwhelm unprepared Russian forces bringing German armies up to the gates of several major Russian cities, Moscow included.

Along their way, Nazi forces would carry out mass arrests and executions of Eastern European Jews, Slavs, and Russians. The Russian people and their allies fought bitterly at the cost of millions of lives to first slow then stop the invasion, then turn it back before finally reaching the gates of Berlin themselves.

Nearly 10,000 Russian troops are in Ukraine according to Ukraine's president, and yet there hasn't been a single reliable independent confirmation of this incredible claim

Ukrainian chocolate sultan Petro Poroshenko told the World Economic Forum this afternoon that there are currently 9,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, according to a breaking news report from Reuters.

Speaking in Switzerland, Poroshenko added that the sneaky Russian invaders were backed by a range of heavy weapons including tanks and artillery systems. Poroshenko provided no evidence to back up his claims: no photographs, satellite images, radio interceptions or even twitter messages.

"If this is not aggression, what is aggression?" Poroshenko asked the Forum attendees.

A baseless lie designed to garner sympathy with the international community? Or maybe Russia stole Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, stretched it out 10 km, and is marching an entire army under its invisible magic? Both hypotheses seem plausible.

Moscow and Tehran have signed military cooperation deal that implies wider collaboration in personnel training and counter-terrorism activities. It may also resolve the situation concerning the delivery of Russian S300 missiles, Iranian media reported.

Russia's Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and his Iranian counterpart Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan, signed the document during a visit by Russia's top brass to Iran's capital on Tuesday.

Under the new agreement, the broadened cooperation will include military personnel training exchanges, increased counter-terrorism cooperation and enhanced capabilities for both countries' Navies to use each other's ports more frequently.

If you listened closely this morning, you could hear humanity vomit as JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, began to speak at Davos.In what amounted to some of the most egotistical and delusional statements heard at a conference filled with egotistical and delusional participants, Mr. Dimon didn't disappoint. Here are a couple highlights courtesy of Twitter:

*DIMON SAYS 'YOU DON'T WANT A WEAK JPMORGAN' - or else

- Tim Backshall (@credittrader) January 21, 2015

Jamie Dimon: Family first, country second, and JP Morgan- it's the best I can do for this world. @jpmorgan $JPM

- Julia Boorstin (@JBoorstin) January 21, 2015

Such shameless insincerity would even make his Best Banker Buddy (BBB) Barry Obama blush. I don't know about you, but I'm eagerly awaiting Mr. Dimon's 2028 Presidential run with Chelsea Clinton as running mate.

But I digress. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it has. Enter billionaire Jeff Greene, who's comments at Davos make Sam Zell look enlightened.

In the wake of the terrorist attack against the French satirical newspaper «Charlie Hebdo», it has become apparent that the magazine's editorial chiefs killed in the attack on its headquarters in Paris and groups such as FEMEN and Pussy Riot are all connected in a campaign to disparage Islam and Christianity. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu used the occasion of the memorial service in Paris attended by a number of world leaders to admonish France's parliament for having recently recognized the independence of Palestine and urge France's large Jewish population to emigrate to Israel.

It was also reported that French President François Hollande specifically did not invite Netanyahu to Paris but that the Israeli Prime Minister appeared nevertheless just so he could insult his French hosts and politicize the memorial service for the 17 victims for his own selfish political purposes. Netanyahu's antics in Paris were followed by a visit to French Prime Minister Manuel Valls by members of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, which represents 50 national Jewish groups in the United States, to urge France to withdrawal its recognition of Palestine in the wake of the attacks on the «Charlie Hebdo» offices and the Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket in Paris.

The entire «Charlie Hebdo» affair has laid bare the inner workings of a newspaper that began as a left-wing counter-culture mocker of the establishment in the aftermath of the Paris Spring uprising of 1968. «Charlie» is a reference to French President Charles De Gaulle who was forced out of office as a result of the Paris student riots of 1968.

The assassination by two Franco-Algerian brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, of «Charlie Hebdo» chief editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as «Charb» to his readers, and three of his top cartoonists, was no surprise to Henri Roussel, the magazine's founder and original editor whose pen name is Delfeil de Ton. In an interview with «Nouvel Observateur,» Roussel said he warned Charb against provoking Muslims with repeated cartoons, some gratuitously sexual, of the Prophet Mohammed. Roussel said that one of the slain cartoonists feared that the cartoons would come back to «haunt» the newspaper, which suffered an arson attack in 2011. The attack came after the magazine published a Mohammed cartoon on its front cover. Roussel said of the 2011 cartoon: «He [Charb] shouldn't have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012.»

In this globalised world, if we launch weapons of great destructive power into communities abroad, incinerating and shredding women and children, we cannot avoid the fact that those who identify with those communities - ethnically, culturally and religiously - will take revenge on people here. If we are lucky it will be revenge on combatants. If we are unlucky it will be on our innocents. But either way, the truth is this. We caused it.

We caused it by our invasions, occupations and bombings of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, none of which had ever attacked the UK. We caused it by all the dead women and children that British bombs, missiles or bullets killed accidentally. We caused it by the terrible deaths of the people we killed deliberately, who were only defending their country from foreign invaders, just as most of us would do. We caused it by the detainees killed or tortured. As a country, the United Kingdom caused it.

This is not the 19th century. Imperialist aggression now brings a danger of retaliation from empathetic communities embedded in western societies. This is so obvious as not to need stating. The danger of terrorism from Islamic sources would be much reduced if we just minded our own business on the international scene.