"This [U.S-Russian conflict that's being carried out in Ukraine] is a prelude to World War III. A lot of people know this." So says Yuri Shcherbak, who was Ukraine's Ambassador in Washington during 1994-1998.

Dr. Shcherbak was one of Ukraine's few progressives ever to become an official of the Ukrainian Government. He now is speaking out publicly for the first time to express his concern about the movement toward a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia, and about Ukraine's dangerous current role in helping to bring that about.

In 1998, he authored a book The Strategic Role of Ukraine, published by Harvard University Press; so, this is a subject that he knows a lot about.

In 2014, a series of often seemingly intertwining child sex abuse stories have engulfed the UK in what has become the biggest scandal of modern times. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the whole country feels duped, dirtied, and, worse, connected in some way. Culprits and alleged culprits have included celebrities, the social services and police (whose systemic failures resulted in an estimated 1,400 children being sexually exploited in the town of Rotherham between 1997 and 2013), politicians (the evidence of a pedophile ring operating within the corridors of Westminster during the 1980s is now incontrovertible after London´s Metropolitan Police described allegations from an anonymous survivor as "credible and true" this month), and even employees of the Royal Family (British tabloid the Sunday People recently revealed that the House of Windsor was also implicated in abuses centered around accusations from a 16-year-old boy).

The town of Rochdale lies at the center of two of these recent child sex scandals. In 2012, nine Pakistani men were convicted of running a "grooming" operation that targeted young girls there, and it was also home of the late Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Cyril Smith, a 400-pound giant of a man who reportedly terrorized the local Knowl View Residential School.

And here are 7 very good reasons why you should love it, too!


Special thanks to the Chaos Computer Club e. V. (CCC) for making the English version possible.

Source/Credits:
Statistic (PDF)
Deutsche Version
Video Creator - Alexander Lehmann
Voice: Dulcie Smart
Translation: Paul James Compton

Few countries have invested more heavily in Russia than Germany has, rushing in to exploit new trade opportunities that opened up after the Cold War ended. More than 6,000 German companies set up operations there, and Russia became a major customer for German cars, pharmaceuticals and machinery.

But now the rush is going in reverse. The announcement last week by the German chemical giant BASF that it had canceled a planned deal with Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, involving natural gas extraction and distribution, was the latest example of how German companies are delaying projects and investment.

Opel, the car-making unit of G.M. based in Germany, has laid off workers at its plant in St. Petersburg; Volkswagen shut down an auto plant in Kaluga intermittently because of poor demand; and Fresenius, a health care company, canceled a joint venture with Russian partners.

Earlier today, Saudi Arabia's stock market fell sharply with the Tadawul All Share Index plunging following a Saudi state TV report that King Abdullah had been admitted to hospital for tests. As shown in the chart report, the index tumbled as much as 6% in the minutes after the Saudi Press Agency report which quoted a brief royal court statement.

But while the ill king of the King, aged 90, is hardly news to the discounting stock market, a few more nuanced interpretation of not just what happens if and when the King passes away but what Saudi succession looks like, is much more relevant for oil - especially now that Saudi Arabia has unilaterally decided to tear apart OPEC in its push to put US shale producers out of business.

As Emad Mostaque of EC Strat, accurately observes:

Oil prices are now at levels that cause real concern on the streets of Saudi Arabia, with the prospect of succession the icing on top that has caused retail investors to take the market down another leg.

This policy may not make it through a succession period, where public support and good will is essential, particularly as it has nearly been 20 years since the last change.

The new regent could decide to keep existing policy, change it completely or anything he decides. Similarly he has free reign to realign Saudi Arabia's foreign policy as he wishes, which is a discussion for another time and place, but could have significant regional impacts.

A radioactive leak has been detected at Ukraine's Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, a media report says, citing the country's emergency services. Ukrainian officials have denied the report.

LifeNews published what it claims is a leaked report by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, which denies an earlier assessment by the plant's authorities that the radiation at the facility is equal to the natural background following an incident on Sunday.

RT is trying to verify the report.

Ukrainian authorities have denied the Russian media report that a radioactive leak had taken place at the plant, Reuters reported.

"The plant works normally, there have been no accidents," an energy ministry official told the news agency. No official comment on whether the leaked documents are authentic has been provided.

Two documents released by LifeNews appear to show that the plant's officials put deliberately misleading information on their website. The documents - both addressed to the head of the regional emergency services - state that radiation levels at the plant on Sunday and Monday were 16.8 times higher than the legally permitted norm.

By Monday, the levels had slightly increased - growing from 16.3 to 16.8 times higher, and Unit 6 was still shut down, the report said, contradicting the plant's statements that the problem had been fixed and that the plant was operating normally.

On Sunday, one reactor at the plant was automatically shut down after a glitch, becoming the second halt in operations in recent weeks. The reactor was running at 40 percent of nominal power, the plant's official website said, adding that radiation at the facility being at the level of 8-12 microroentgens an hour.

"So, we made it through 2012 and now, we've got another year notched on our belt in addition: we made it through 2013 and the world still hasn't ended. Or has it?

I would propose that the World As We Knew It ended on 11 September 2001, over 12 years ago. We don't live in the same reality anymore (in case you haven't noticed)."

~ Laura Knight-Jadczyk, 'Happy New Year 2014?'

2014 has been quite a year! The elites have pulled out all the stops on the drive to determine who will be (or continue to be) the "king of the hill" on the Big Blue Marble. We here at Sott.net have taken great pleasure in bringing you a breakdown of the daily intrigue, but now we'd like to take a moment to reflect on the massive changes that have occurred throughout the year.

Overall many of the trends that we've seen played out this year slide right along with what Laura Knight-Jadczyk predicted in December of 2013:

• Pandemics
• Social upheaval
• Financial meltdown
• Climate chaos

And as we look back over the year we see that many things stayed the same: Israel butchered Palestinians, NATO armed terrorist groups and financed their enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the West continued to disintegrate. Israel and NATO combined to put the lives of 15 million children in terrible jeopardy. But overall the trend towards the emergence of a new economic order seemed to arch over all of these developments "on the ground".

In concert with the political chaos, social chaos continued this year with dozens of popular anti-austerity and anti-establishment protests around the world, including major protests in the US against the pervasive police brutality that afflicts that nation.

The earth continued to groan and shake, and each of us has faced difficult decisions that have shaped our futures. In this article we'll remind you of major events in our cosmic and planetary environment, in the global geopolitical sphere and the effects it may be having on the human level. Hold on for a wild ride through the year of 2014!

Introduction:
By any measure 2014 has been a truly historic year which saw huge, I would say, even tectonic developments. This year ends in very high instability, and the future looks hard to guess. I don't think that anybody can confidently predict what might happen next year. So what I propose to do today is something far more modest. I want to look into some of the key events of 2014 and think of them as vectors with a specific direction and magnitude. I want to look in which direction a number of key actors (countries) "moved" this year and with what degree of intensity. Then I want to see whether it is likely that they will change course or determination. Then adding up all the "vectors" of these key actors (countries) I want to make a calculation and see what resulting vector we will obtain for the next year. Considering the large number of "unknown unknowns" (to quote Rumsfeld) this exercise will not result in any kind of real prediction, but my hope is that it will prove a useful analytical reference.

The main event and the main actors

A comprehensive analysis of 2014 should include most major countries on the planet, but this would be too complicated and, ultimately, useless. I think that it is indisputable that the main event of 2014 has been the war in the Ukraine. This crisis not only overshadowed the still ongoing Anglo-Zionist attack on Syria, but it pitted the world's only two nuclear superpowers (Russia and the USA) directly against each other. And while some faraway countries did have a minor impact on the Ukrainian crisis, especially the BRICS, I don't think that a detailed discussion of South African or Brazilian politics would contribute much. There is a short list of key actors whose role warrants a full analysis. They are:

1. The USA
2. The Ukrainian Junta
3. The Novorussians (DNR+LNR)
4. Russia
5. The EU
6. NATO
7. China

I submit that these seven actors account for 99.99% of the events in the Ukraine and that an analysis of the stance of each one of them is crucial. So let's take them one by one:

1 - The USA

Of all the actors in this crisis, the USA is by far the most consistent and coherent one. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland were very clear about US objectives in the Ukraine:

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Without Ukraine Russia ceases to be an empire, while with Ukraine - bought off first and subdued afterwards, it automatically turns into an empire...(...) the new world order under the hegemony of the United States is created against Russia and on the fragments of Russia. Ukraine is the Western outpost to prevent the recreation of the Soviet Union.

Hillary Clinton: There is a move to re-Sovietise the region (...) It's not going to be called that. It's going to be called a customs union, it will be called a Eurasian Union and all of that, (...) But let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.

Victoria Nuland: F**k the EU!

Between the three, these senior US "deep-staters" have clearly and unambiguously defined the primary goal of the USA: to take control of the Ukraine to prevent Russia from becoming a new Soviet Union, regardless of what the EU might have to say about that. Of course, there were other secondary goals which I listed in June of this year (see here):

As a reminder of what the US goals were in the Ukraine: (in no particular order)

I have color-coded these objectives into the following categories:

Current "score card": 1 "achieved", 5 "possible, 2 "compromised" and 3 "failed".

Imagine a sign pinned to the podium on the floor of the US Senate that reads 'Ferguson will be ours!' Pictured on it is an armored personnel carrier with the United States flag driving over a mountain of corpses. This picture shown says just that about Donbass. This is Kiev's official statement on mass murder for the area. This was pinned to the podium on the floor of the Ukrainian Senate (Verkhovna Rada).

President Petro Poroshenko and his government have run out of wiggle room to deflect charges of genocide any more.

On December 18th the newly appointed Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Senate) deputy Semen Semenchenko, formerly commander of the battalion "Donbass" warned that Ukraine intends to pursue terrorists from Donbass anywhere in the world. The terrorists from Donbass Semenchenko wants to pursue is anyone that did not leave when the ATO began.

Andrey Biletsky, former "Azov" battalion commander, Ukrainian nationalist ideologist, and a favorite in Victoria Nuland's circles (Biletsky was made a Verkhovna Rada deputy by Arseni Yatsenyuk) made clear who those terrorists are in an interview with Foreign Policy.

"Unfortunately, among the Ukrainian people today there are a lot of 'Russians' (by their mentality, not their blood), 'kikes,' 'Americans,' 'Europeans' (of the democratic-liberal European Union), 'Arabs,' 'Chinese' and so forth, but there is not much specifically Ukrainian... It's unclear how much time and effort will be needed to eradicate these dangerous viruses from our people."

Biletsky, a new Senator who is being groomed for the Ukrainian presidency thinks even his American handlers are part of the virus infecting Ukraine.

The UN Security Council has failed to adopt the Arab coalition's bid calling for the creation of a Palestinian state and an end to Israeli "occupation". The US and Australia voted against the move with 5 abstentions.

The draft resolution gathered only 8 votes in favour, so it was automatically defeated. The US however still used its veto power and voted against the resolution. Another veto power state, the UK, along with Lithuania, Nigeria, Korea and Rwanda have abstained from the vote.

An official bid for statehood was submitted to the Council Tuesday by a Jordan-led Arab coaltion. The bid featured a revised draft resolution of a similar proposal submitted earlier this month. Delegates voted on the measure Tuesday afternoon.

Highly opposed by the US and Israel, the first version of the draft resolution was submitted "in blue" to the UN Security Council last Wednesday. The Council includes five permanent members who hold veto power and ten additional members who serve two-year terms.

The resolution gives 12 months for a "just, lasting and comprehensive peaceful solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which it regards as the creation of a "sovereign and viable" Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, as well as the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from the occupied territory by 2017.