The summit in Minsk of the presidents of the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose cluster of 11 former Soviet constituent republics, was doomed to attract attention; Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was conspicuously absent. The head of the Commonwealth's second-most populous member state preferred to visit the Italian city of Milan instead.

The presidents, quite predictably, saw Poroshenko's move as a snub; two of them, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, personally scolded Poroshenko for failing to respect his neighbors and for his heavy-handed approach to the war on his own territory. The fact that Poroshenko was criticized not by Russia's Vladimir Putin, but by two of Russia's NEIGHBORS, calls into question the main narrative of the Western press regarding the war in Ukraine and the way it is viewed by other post-Soviet states. During the past six months or more, the Western newspapers have been full of reports about other post-Soviet countries, especially ones with sizable Russian minorities, being all jittery because of the possibility of Russian "aggression" under the pretext of protecting these minorities.

We first exposed the "secret" US-Saudi deal in September which led to the inevitable bombing of Syria. We then progressed to explain the quid pro quo of the deal in lower oil prices (benefiting US consumers into an election and crushing Russian revenues). In today's Wall Street Journal we get the final piece of the puzzle as it is clear that what Saudi Arabia loses in 'price' it will make up in 'volume' as The Kingdom is taking the unusual step of asking buyers to commit to maximum shipments if they want to get its crude. Simply put, "they are threatening [European] buyers" to discontinue sales if they don't agree with the full fixed deliveries. The 'oil weapon' grows stronger...

As The Wall Street Journal explains,

Days after slashing prices in Asia, Saudi Arabia is now making an aggressive push in the European oil market, traders say.

The kingdom is taking the unusual step of asking buyers to commit to maximum shipments if they want to get its crude.

"The Saudi push is not just in Asia. It's a global phenomenon," one oil trader said. "They are using very aggressive tactics" in Europe too, the trader added.

This month, state-owned Saudi Aramco stunned the rest of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by slashing its November prices to defend its market share in Asia's growing market. The move, setting a price war in the oil-production group, was combined with a boost in the kingdom's output in September.

But Riyadh is also moving to protect its sales to Europe, a declining market where it is facing rivalry from returning Libyan production.

After cutting its November prices there, Saudi Aramco is also asking refiners to commit to full, fixed deliveries in talks to renew contracts for next year, the traders say. They say the Saudi oil company had previously offered a formula allowing flexibility of more or less 10% of contracted volumes, the most commonly used in the industry.

"They are threatening buyers" to discontinue sales if they don't agree with the fixed deliveries, another trader said.

Following the news coming out of the US and its concubine states can sometimes be very disorienting. What do you publish when so much is being violated simultaneously?

Running a blog means a constant source of information from around the world of the so many violations of sovereignty, genocides, terrorism and lies that the west has undertaken in its quest to rule supreme against the people of this planet.

As is the case with the dogs of war, they bark and compete to outdo each other in an effort to please their masters. Be it the demonic joint venture of the US/Gulf Arabs/Israel/EU, also commonly known as IS, or be it the wholesale murder of civilians in Pakistan, the story is the same: We, the people, are under attack from the Empire.

New financial disclosure documents released this month by the National Security Agency (NSA) show that Keith Alexander, who served as its director from August 2005 until March 2014, had thousands of dollars of investments during his tenure in a handful of technology firms.

Each year disclosed has a checked box next to this statement: "Reported financial interests or affiliations are unrelated to assigned or prospective duties, and no conflicts appear to exist."

Alexander repeatedly made the public case that the American public is at "greater risk" from a terrorist attack in the wake of the Snowden disclosures.

Statements such as those could have a positive impact on the companies he was invested in, which could have eventually helped his personal bottom line.

The NSA did not immediately respond to Ars' requests for further comment.

The documents were obtained and published Friday by Vice News as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent lawsuit against the NSA brought by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold.

The 60 released pages, which cover a period from 2008 through 2013, document that as of 2008, Alexander had as much as $50,000 invested in Synchronoss, a cloud storage firm. Synchronoss provides services to major mobile phone providers, including AT&T, Verizon and others.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Valery Geletey has officially stepped down with President Petro Poroshenko accepting his resignation. The Ukrainian leader is expected to announce a candidate for a new Defense Minister on Monday.

Poroshenko hopes the country's Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, will support the candidacy he will propose and a new Defense Minister will be appointed as soon as on Tuesday, Oct.14, a statement on the Presidential official website said.

"I am sure that there will be no delays with the voting for a new Minister. I expect this will happen on Tuesday," Poroshenko said.

The Ukrainian president stressed that it was time "to change the military leadership."

Valery Geletey, who has served as the country's Defense Minister since July 3, 2014, filed a resignation report back on Friday.

He has recently faced harsh criticism over Kiev's anti-terrorist operation failures in south-east Ukraine, particularly in Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

Earlier in August, hundreds of protesters in Kiev, many of whom were mothers and wives of the soldiers involved in the fighting in Donetsk and Lugansk, demanded Geletey's resignation.

As a Defense Minister he has also been part of several scandals.

Geletey threatened to file a law suit against Yulia Timoshenko, who accused him in selling weapons to militants in Donetsk and Lugansk.

In September, he also accused Russia of using tactical nuclear weapons against Kiev army fighters. This sparked sarcastic comments from Moscow and criticism from the rival Ukrainian Interior Ministry.

The Ukrainian general himself later denied the nuclear allegations, saying that the journalist had misinterpreted his words.

In early October, Russia's top Investigative Agency launched a criminal case against Geletey over murder accusations, the use of prohibited means and methods of warfare and genocide.

Watching the debate in the British parliament last Thursday, over whether Britain should, yet again, launch aerial attacks against the long-suffering people of Iraq, it was striking just how much admission there was of the failure of Britain's policy in the region hitherto.

That ISIS have been emboldened, or even created, by the West's insistence on supporting the armed insurgency in Syria over the past three years - pouring money, weapons and training (including even in public relations) into the hands of fighters of all shades - was admitted again and again by MPs from all parties, as was the reality that it was precisely the dysfunctional state bequeathed by the occupation that had allowed ISIS to take root in Iraq. But those very same MPs then almost all went on to explain that would be voting ('reluctantly', 'with a heavy heart', etc etc) for the government's motion. The implicit argument was that, yes, we have being doing the wrong thing for the past three years (or past eleven years); but now we have a chance to put it right; indeed it is precisely because we helped create the 'beast' that we must now help to kill it.

In Ukraine, however, these efforts seem to have failed. Here's why that's a good thing
We do not read much about Ukraine lately, do we? With unseemly speed, among the most important developments of the last few years has fallen out of the paper. There is a reason for this: Washington has sustained another, in this case very major, defeat. The policy failed. And we Americans cannot talk about defeat and failure if they are our own.

The moment of truth was the cease-fire accord the Kiev government, Moscow and the two republics declared in eastern Ukraine signed in Minsk on September 5. With that document, Vladimir Putin succeeded in putting a stop to the preposterous charade wherein Ukraine was supposed to swerve smoothly into the Euro-American camp, so rolling out the neoliberal agenda like linoleum straight up to Russia's borders.

Nice try, Victoria Nuland and all other "new world order" idolators. Actually, it was a very horrific try, costing several thousand lives and wrecking cities and vast parts of eastern Ukraine's productive infrastructure. All this for the sake of deregulated capital and "free markets." Is there a widow in Donetsk who will one day explain, "Son, your father died because the Americans put people in charge who wanted corporations such as Chevron to profit from our resources while pushing our family into poverty?"

The Minsk protocol provides for a sanitized corridor nearly 20 miles wide between Kiev-controlled territory and the eastern sections of the country, where Russian is the first language and the seductions of free-market capitalism have not gone over so well. This is near-term common sense.

Further out, the eastern Donbass is to get some degree of autonomy greater than the insincere offer Kiev has made to date. And the eastern region will hold its own elections, these now brought forward over Kiev's objections to November 2.

We witness the federalization of Ukraine, in a word - the sensible way forward from the first, a perfectly good expression of the nation's divisions, except that Russian leader Vladimir Putin advocated a federal Ukraine, so it could not be right.

From all one can make out, Putin shaped this deal in back-channel collaboration with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. This is significant, in my view, and I will return to the point further on.

It is difficult to call this outcome, assuming it stays on track, a success for the neoconservatives at the State Department, or the phony foundations State sponsors to advance the corporatization of the planet in the name of democracy. Too many casualties, too much wreckage, the new government in Kiev is already revealed as another crew of corrupt incompetents, and all that got done was the stimulation of animosities that ought to have been discouraged.

We have reached a point in our nation's descent into psychotic tribalist fear where people of stature and apparent sobriety unabashedly use the expression "final solution" when discussing the existence of Muslims.

For ISIS "and those similarly motivated," insists retired Marine Lt. Col. James G. Zumwalt in an essay published by Family Security Matters, "a rational world should recognize but one 'final solution' exists - their extinction."

For Zumwalt. "those similarly motivated" is an expansive category, which includes not only "al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran, Somalia's Shababb, [and the] Khorasan group," but also their Muslim victims. On the basis of murkily sourced atrocity accounts and propaganda videos of dubious provenance, Zumwalt concludes that the victims of ISIS exhibit a "Muslim death wish" by supposedly allowing themselves to be killed without seeking "to overpower their captors."

"The message to take from Muslim victims unwilling to save themselves to pursue their promised afterlife should be clear: their murderers will never be convinced to stop killing," asserts Zumwalt. An unspoken but undeniable corollary of his view is that wholesale annihilation of Muslim populations is strategically necessary and morally justifiable, because Muslim victims of terrorism are infected with the same "ideology" as their captors.

This week on SOTT Talk Radio: is the increasing Ebola hysteria justified? Is it safer to be paranoid? Or is the scare blown out of proportion? We also looked into historical cases of real devastating outbreaks to see what can and does happen from time to time: outbreaks with mortality rates of up to 90+%.

Is US Senator John McCain fit for public office? Because he's been making some real weird statements of late, mostly to do with the ISIS islama-terra boogeymen. It's not just people behaving strangely of late. What is going on in the animal kingdom? Pets attacking owners in every US state; elephants attacking villages in India; hyenas attacking people in Africa; and bears attacking people in Canada and Russia.

All this and more in this week's Connecting the Dots:

Running Time: 01:57:00

Download: MP3

In the shelling in Donetsk four civilians were killed and eleven got injured, Donetsk local authorities reported on the website on Sunday.

"During the entire day on October 11, shelling of the Kuibyshev district continued," the report reads. "On October 11, in Donetsk were killed four civilians and eleven got injured."

As of early morning on Sunday, the situation "in the city is not quiet. Locals say sounds of firing from heavy weaponry are heard in many districts from time to time.

On October 11, Prime Minister of self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) Alexander Zakharchenko said jointly with the Luhansk Republic they announced the so-called "silence regime."

On Tuesday evening, the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council's information and analysis centre announced the so-called "silence regime" during which combat operations and shelling in the contact zone of Kiev's troops and south-eastern militias should be stopped.