Israel allegedly decided to freeze a monthly transfer of tax revenues to the Palestinian authorities after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a request to join the International Criminal Court, Reuters reports, citing an Israeli official.

The monthly tax revenues amount to approximately $125 million. Palestinians use the funds to run their government and pay salaries to those employed in the public sector. Israel collects customs duties and taxes on behalf of the Palestinian authorities under the 1993 agreements, known as the Oslo Accords, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Israel repeatedly halted transfer of monthly revenues as sanctions against Palestine at times of heightened security and diplomatic tensions, according to Reuters.

Gold and derivatives expert Rob Kirby thinks crashing oil prices are going to lead to a 2008 style financial meltdown. This is not a maybe - a market explosion is going to happen in 2015. Kirby contends,

"Oh yes, without a doubt, it will. It must because the income crude oil sales generate are used to pay the interest on the debt. . . . If you have a mortgage payment of $5,000 at the end of the month and you only have $2,500, you have defaulted. That is the position they are in right now. We just need to wait for some coupon dates to come and go because these guys won't have the money. They don't have the income."

Washington's meddling across Asia has grabbed headlines recently in Hong Kong where US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded opposition leaders attempted to trigger a "color revolution" targeting the government of Beijing and Hong Kong's local administrators. Its spectacular failure was owed to the almost immediate exposure of the protesters as foreign-backed proxies serving foreign interests.

Additionally, political chaos has plagued Thailand amid a half-year struggle to oust Wall Street-Washington-backed dictator Thaksin Shinawatra and his subversive, well-funded proxy political front and various faux-rights advocates all extensively funded by Washington. Malaysia has likewise fought carbon-copies of US-backed opposition fronts in Hong Kong and Thailand, with its own battle against "Berish" led by Wall Street and Washington's Anwar Ibrahim.

Popular support, despite reports by the Western media, in each respective country, has been exposed as extremely small. In Thailand, for instance, even at the height of Shinawatra's bid to seize back power in 2010, his "red shirt" movement represented a paltry 7% of Thailand's 70 million citizens - a minority that has only shrunk since then.

US foreign policy just jumped the shark: a few days after both the FBI and the US State department were humiliated when it was revealed that it wasn't North Korea but a disgruntled, laid off Sony employee that was responsible for the "hack", and when the best possible course of action would have been to simply let this latest embarrassing incident fade from memory, moments ago Obama - currently not working out next to a rainbow or flashing his support of "Shaka" - just signed his first executive order of 2015, imposing even more sanctions against North Korea.

The Russian Government's Tass 'news' agency is alleging that "The US private military company Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) ... has confirmed to the Kiev authorities its readiness to start training an experimental battalion of 550 men as of January at the request of Ukraine's General Staff," according to an unnamed source, which source is probably one of the few remaining anti-nazi bureaucrats still remaining in the Ukrainian Government. The reported price of this Blackwater (a.k.a. "Xe," a.k.a. "Academi") training contract is $3.5 million.

Furthermore, "'Ukraine has said it is ready to pay the money on the condition of assistance from the Ukrainian association Patriot, providing technical and financial support for the project,' the source said."

That organization is Patriot of Ukraine. If this report in Tass is true, then the Ukrainian Government, which now is being funded almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers (inasmuch as it no longer meets the financial requirements of the IMF and EU, both of which receive funding from both U.S. and European taxpayers), and for which the U.S. Congress just passed and the U.S. President just signed into law in December authorization of a $450 million donation, is now co-funding this military training, along with - as wikipedia describes "Patriot of Ukraine" (but with wikipedia's footnotes removed) -

a Ukrainian nationalist organization with racist and neo-Nazi political beliefs. It constitutes a paramilitary wing of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (S.N.A.), an assemblage of neo-Nazi organizations and groups founded in 2008 that share the social-national ideology and agree upon building a social-national state in Ukraine. Both the "Patriot of Ukraine" and the S.N.A. engage in political violence against minorities and their political opponents. The leader of the "Patriot of Ukraine" and of the Social-National Assembly is Andriy Biletsky.

The S.N.A. derived from "the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine," whose name was derived from the National Socialist Party of Germany - the original Nazis. America's CIA hides its longstanding support of nazis after World War II (see this and this), but the Bushes and Obama have continued it even decades after the Soviet Union and its communism ended. Consequently, in 2004, the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine was advised by the CIA to, and it did, change its name to the "Freedom Party," or "Svoboda," because that sounds better to Americans.

Biletsky has been kept out of high official authority in its post-coup Ukrainian Government, by the Obama Administration, but wikipedia's article on Ukraine's racist and overtly pro-Hitler "Azov Battalion" notes that Biletsky was placed in charge of the Azov Battalion, and also that Biletsky "was awarded by Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko with a military decoration, 'Order For Courage'," so that the post-coup Ukrainian Government publicly honored this high nazi ('nazi' meaning racist-fascist, irrespective of any political party) operative, which Biletsky certainly has been, and is. Even the pro-U.S.-invasion Foreign Policy magazine has described the Azov Battalion as "fascist." That propaganda-organ of the American aristocracy says "The conflict in eastern Ukraine has come, in some ways, to resemble a battle between Ukrainian and Russian nationalists," condemning both sides equally, without even mentioning that this is an invasion by nazis into the Donbass region - as if whom the invaders are, and whom the defenders are, makes no difference (which is a very convenient underlying assumption for today's United States Government to promote, especially since ours is now a fascist if not outright nazi government, despite the liberal rhetoric from Obama and some others, to fool suckers - and the American public are no longer represented in it).

Russia's 11th humanitarian aid convoy to eastern Ukraine has left a rescue center near Moscow early Sunday morning and is heading towards the border between Russia and Ukraine.
Russia's 11th humanitarian aid convoy to Ukraine's southeastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk left a rescue center near Moscow on Sunday morning and is heading to the Russian border region of Rostov, the country's Emergencies Ministry said.

The convoy of more than 60 trucks with humanitarian aid left the Noginsky Rescue Center at 6:00 a.m. local time (03:00 GMT). The rescuers of the center in Nogino have repeatedly delivered humanitarian cargo to Ukraine's southeast.

"The 11th convoy carrying humanitarian aid for Donbas [Ukraine's southeast] will be formed of these trucks as well as of the trucks going to Rostov Region from other areas [of Russia]," the ministry said.

Earlier on Saturday, the head of the Russian National Crisis Management Center Viktor Yatsutsenko said that the convoy will include 120 vehicles and is set to deliver more than 1,400 tonnes of aid.

Since August, Russian convoys have delivered some 13,400 tonnes of humanitarian aid to eastern Ukraine, including food, medicines, power generators and warm winter clothing.

The Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Donbas are facing a major humanitarian crisis after Kiev-led forces began a military operation against local independence supporters in April.

Last December in my New Year's predictions for 2014 I wrote:

My clearest reading of 2014's tea leaves is "instability": worldwide instability and in my opinion this instability has its origins at the heart of the most developed economies of the western world. The causes? We are undergoing a technological revolution and process of globalized outsourcing, combined with a reduction of the welfare state that is severely degrading the middle class in developed countries and converting them slowly, but surely into working-poor. Anyone who has read a bit of history could tell you how dangerous that is.

I will stand on that this year too and I think things are going to get worse, perhaps much, much worse. The Reuters year end wrap gives a rather useful shopping lists of potential disasters.

"Normally after a year like this you might expect things to calm down," said John Bassett, former senior official with British signals intelligence agency GCHQ now an associate at Oxford University. "But none of these problems have been resolved and the drivers of them are not going away." The causes are varied - a global shift of economic power from the West, new technologies, regional rivalries and anger over rising wealth gaps. Reuters

I would add to that the possibility of an airborne pandemic, a sort of sneezing "Ebola", which is going to happen sooner or later in today's interconnected world... or (much more likely if the US-EU pressure doesn't let up) some very, very nasty surprise from Russia, because as Dimitri Orlov says, "The Russians don't threaten, they act".

At least 18 people have been killed when US-led foreign forces carried out an airstrike in Afghanistan's eastern province of Paktika.

Mukhlis Afghan, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said on Saturday that the airstrike targeted a convoy of Taliban militants in Gayan District, located approximately 175 kilometers (108 miles) southeast of the capital, Kabul, late on Friday.

He added that at least 18 militants were slain and three pickup trucks destroyed in the assault.

The Taliban have made no comments on the incident so far.

The US-led foreign forces in Afghanistan have recently increased their air raids against civilian areas.

Outgoing Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R) took to social media late this week to congratulate herself for bringing the price of gas down under two dollars per gallon.

The erstwhile 2012 presidential contender posted a photo of herself standing under a gasoline station's pricing sign on Friday via the social medium Twitter. She captioned the image "$2 gas, anyone?"

Bachmann was referring to a campaign promise from her failed run at the presidency in which she vowed to bring gas prices back down under two dollars per gallon.

"Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again," Bachmann said at a South Carolina rally in 2012. "That will happen."

Now, gas prices have tumbled, which Bachmann is more than happy to take credit for, in spite of the fact that she lost her bid for the GOP nomination in 2012, let alone the presidency.

A new report by the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute emphasises the need for "US security and military support" to its key allies in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly Israel, over access to recent vast discoveries of regional oil and gas.

The Army study, released earlier in December 2014, concludes that extensive US military involvement "may prove essential in managing possible future conflict" in case of "an eruption of natural resource conflict in the East Mediterranean," due to huge gas discoveries in recent years.

Visible US engagement is also necessary to ward off the regional encroachment of "emerging powers and potential new peace brokers such as Russia - which already entertains a strong interest in East Mediterranean gas developments - and notably China."