Western diplomats have reportedly faulted Iran in recent weeks for failing to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency with information on experiments on high explosives intended to produce a nuclear weapon, according to an intelligence document the IAEA is investigating.

But the document not only remains unverified but can only be linked to Iran by a far-fetched official account marked by a series of coincidences related to a foreign scientist that that are highly suspicious.

"We've been taken for a ride on this whole thing." -- Robert Kelley, chief of IAEA teams in Iraq

The original appearance of the document in early 2008, moreover, was not only conveniently timed to support Israel's attack on a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in December that was damaging to Israeli interests, but was leaked to the news media with a message that coincided with the current Israeli argument.

The IAEA has long touted the document, which came from an unidentified member state, as key evidence justifying suspicion that Iran has covered up past nuclear weapons work.

In its September 2008 report the IAEA said the document describes "experimentation in connection with symmetrical initiation of a hemispherical high explosive charge suitable for an implosion type nuclear device."

Making Russia change its stance by way of sanctions is outdated thinking in an age when diversity of opinion is supposed to be appreciated, Foreign Minister Lavrov believes. He says Russia is already "doing more than anybody else" to help Ukraine.

Moscow can hardly be accused of non-facilitating the peace-process in Ukraine, as it is exerting all of the authority it can on the anti-government forces in eastern Ukraine to make sure they comply with the September Minsk peace agreements, Sergey Lavrov said in his Sunday interview to the Russian NTV channel. It's the West, according to him, who could actually do more to resolve the Ukrainian crisis.

"Our Western partners... aren't really using their influence on Kiev to persuade them that there's no alternative to the agreements they've already reached with the self-defense," the minister said.

The West is meanwhile ever ready to put additional pressure on Moscow in the form of sanctions, which in Lavrov's point of view have little to do with the situation in Ukraine.

A few days ago, Brussels served notice that NATO refuses to cooperate with Russia on Afghanistan. Furthermore, the alliance is shunting aside any opportunity to return to the level of cooperation with Russia that it had before.

The causes are obvious. The deep divisions concerning the matters of Syria and Ukraine have brought about a freeze. Regardless of that, however, the NATO demarche is not promoting regional stability. On the contrary, it fits with the view of many experts that NATO is deliberately trying to surround Russia's southern flank in an arc of instability.

The United States has decided to begin a new war on international terrorism in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. At the NATO summit in Wales, the American plan received the full support of the alliance. The primary enemy in this war is the terrorist group called the Islamic State. Incidentally, they're the rebels Washington nurtured, the ones who got military aid and were trained by American instructors in Turkey and the Gulf countries. Having firmly established their presence, they are now freewheeling independent operators marching to the beat of their own drum. Now Washington is fighting against them.

"The United States underestimated the religious motivations of the rebels," Alexander Sobianin, the director of strategic planning at the Association for Cross-Border Cooperation, said in an interview with the author. "The special forces of the Gulf states, which invested far less in these groups than the United States did, could have redirected their objectives very quickly. The outcome left even cynical American intelligence services in a state of shock: videotaped beheadings of dozens of Americans and Europeans, the mass rape of women and children... The actions of Islamists in the broader Middle East, including Afghanistan, have become a direct threat to the strategic interests of the United States."

But characteristic is the fact that when Syrian President Bashar Assad consented to the bombing of the "caliphate's" positions in Syria, Turkey, which had previously taken great pains to distance itself from its NATO allies and their anti-terrorism operations, sprang back to life instantaneously. Taking advantage of the extremely complex Kurdish refugee situation, Ankara needed little time to decide that Turkish troops could be inserted into Syria. Turkey was acting on the Syrian Kurds' request for help and safety in response to the Islamists' capture of the tomb of Shah Suleyman, who was the grandfather of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire. This Syrian exclave is considered Turkish soil. Damascus, naturally, is dead-set against the Turkish course of action. It is becoming clear to everyone that the so-called "anti-terrorist operation" is just another attempt to overthrow the Assad government.

The Cold War is back. Or at least, some version of it has returned, with Russian troops on the move across the Crimean Peninsula with the oddsmakers predicting it will once again be Russian territory.

For critics of President Barack Obama, this is a prime opportunity to demonstrate how poorly he stacks up compared with the man who did all he could to topple the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan.

Reagan's son, Michael Reagan, offered this advice for Obama on the Townhall.com website:

"I suggest that President Obama might want to study how Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. He did it without firing a shot, as we know, but he had a super weapon -- oil. Oil was the only thing the Soviets had in the 1980s that anyone in the rest of the world wanted to buy, besides ICBMs and H-bombs, and they weren't for sale. Since selling oil was the source of the Kremlin's wealth, my father got the Saudis to flood the market with cheap oil. Lower oil prices devalued the ruble, causing the USSR to go bankrupt, which led to perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Empire."

Is it just my imagination or is there a global oil war underway pitting the United States and Saudi Arabia on one side against Russia and Iran on the other? One can't say for sure whether the American-Saudi oil alliance is deliberate or a coincidence of interests, but, if it is explicit, then clearly we're trying to do to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exactly what the Americans and Saudis did to the last leaders of the Soviet Union: pump them to death - bankrupt them by bringing down the price of oil to levels below what both Moscow and Tehran need to finance their budgets.

Think about this: four oil producers - Libya, Iraq, Nigeria and Syria - are in turmoil today, and Iran is hobbled by sanctions. Ten years ago, such news would have sent oil prices soaring. But today, the opposite is happening. Global crude oil prices have been falling for weeks, now resting around $88 - after a long stretch at $105 to $110 a barrel.

The price drop is the result of economic slowdowns in Europe and China, combined with the United States becoming one of the world's biggest oil producers - thanks to new technologies enabling the extraction of large amounts of "tight oil" from shale - combined with America starting to make exceptions and allowing some of its newfound oil products to be exported, combined with Saudi Arabia refusing to cut back its production to keep prices higher, but choosing instead to maintain its market share against other OPEC producers. The net result has been to make life difficult for Russia and Iran, at a time when Saudi Arabia and America are confronting both of them in a proxy war in Syria. This is business, but it also has the feel of war by other means: oil.

On October 19, 2014, Paul VI (Monsignor Montini) in a solemn ceremony at the Vatican is to be beatified which is the first step to sainthood A miracle, the curing of an unborn baby's illness, has been attributed to Paul VI. However, Holocaust Victims and their families from Eastern Europe who are locked in a decade's long legal dispute with the Vatican over looted assets from the Second World War, question the saintliness of the man who as Vatican Secretary of State supervised the infamous Vatican ratline funded with Holocaust era loot.

The Vatican Ratline was a post war system of escape routes for Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of the Second World War. The Vatican version was centered at the Croatian Confraternity of Saint Jerome located in Rome at Via Tomacelli 132 just a block away from the Tiber River bridge and next to the sprawling Tomb of Augustus.

The so called "Golden Priest" Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic, the Apostolic Vistator for Croatian matters, was the chief conductor of the Vatican ratline whose beneficiaries included major war criminals like Croatian mass murderer Ante Pavelic who escaped to Argentina in 1947 despite being responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Other ratline escapees included the Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichman.

US President Barack Obama hosted a top-level war council this past week in Washington with the military leaders from 21 countries in attendance - under the official remit of coordinating tactics to defeat the Islamic State extremist group in Syria and Iraq.

The titular American commander-in-chief spoke with the gravitas of a decorated soldier. «This is going to be a long-term campaign and like all military campaigns there will be ups and downs», said Obama to the assembled military chiefs at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington DC.

Obama's presumed military authority was something of an achievement, considering that he is, by profession, a community activist, a professor of constitutional lawyer, and a former senator. The 53-year-old politician has never served a single day of his life in the US military, let alone seen combat action or having been awarded medals for bravery.

But that's not the only anomaly that sprung to mind about Obama's war council in Washington. Together with the usual Western allies of Britain, France, Canada and Australia, there were military top brass from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Gwynedd Councillors have agreed not to conduct future trade with Israel in the wake of the recent conflict in the Gaza Strip.

In a full council meeting last week, councillor Owen Williams proposed a motion condemning Israel for the bombardment and ground invasion of the Palestinian territory.

He said: "Following the latest attacks by the Israeli State on the territory of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, this council calls for the suspension of trading with Israel and condemns the over-reaction and savageness used.

"Furthermore, we confirm and underline this Council's decision not to invest in Israel or that country's establishments.

"We believe that if Gwynedd leads the way that there is hope that other councils in Wales and beyond will follow our example."

Councillor Sian Gwenllian said: "We condemn terrorism but we also condemn the killing of innocent people.

"It's very important that we here in Gwynedd look out at the world and seek to influence where we can."

Though heavily redacted and filled with euphemisms, new document should shake public conscience

Last week the U.S. government submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C., the most recent standard operating procedures (SOPs) for force-feeding in the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. What remains of the documents, after redactions, is a shameful exercise in doublespeak that attempts to disguise what is really happening in the prison.

The SOPs were submitted in a case brought by Abu Wa'el Dhiab, an inmate represented by Reprieve, the international human rights organization that I head. Dhiab is a 43-year-old Syrian and father of four who has been held without trial or charge in Guantánamo for 12 years. The U.S. government told Dhiab four years ago that he was cleared for release, and yet to this day he remains behind bars. In a last resort to get back to his wife and children, he, along with many others, embarked on a hunger strike. His case concerns the manner in which that entirely legitimate hunger strike has been brutally opposed by the prison authorities.

The SOPs continually offer feigned concern for the prisoners. The "sole focus" of the doctors inserting the nasal tubes "is the health and welfare of their patients"; the force-feeding is carried out according to procedures performed "in nursing homes worldwide"; assessments are to be made during the feeding to check "the emotional well-being of the detainee." One typical instruction says that after restraining and force-feeding a prisoner, "a debriefing session is important." The instruction goes on to say - in a sickening parody of customer service - that medical staffers should note "any questions and feedback provided by the detainee."

Read more closely, though, and the cracks soon begin to open. The public learns what is involved when a man is dragged from his cell, strapped to a chair with five belts and held down as a tube - perhaps dangerously lubricated with olive oil - is forced through his nose, down his throat and esophagus and into his stomach so that he can be pumped full of liquid.

The former director of the National Security Agency has enlisted the US surveillance giant's current chief technology officer for his lucrative cybersecurity business venture, an unusual arrangement undercutting Keith Alexander's assurances he will not profit from his connections to the secretive, technologically sophisticated agency.

Patrick Dowd continues to work as a senior NSA official while also working part time for Alexander's IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm reported to charge up to $1m a month for advising banks on protecting their data from hackers. It is exceedingly rare for a US official to be allowed to work for a private, for-profit company in a field intimately related to his or her public function.

Reuters, which broke the story of Dowd's relationship with IronNet, reported that the NSA is reviewing the business deal.