President Vladimir Putin dismissed Western sanctions as "utter foolishness" yesterday and said they would not stop Russia developing into a stronger economic power.

Attempting to take the higher ground in a speech to foreign and Russian investors, Putin said he was relaxed about the measures imposed on his country over Ukraine even though they had broken the fundamental principles of the global economy.

Addressing financiers worried about the weakening economy, capital flight and a possible increase in state intervention, he said Russia was well placed to weather the storm.

"We truly want a country that is strong, flourishing, free and open to the world," he told the VTB Russia Calling investment conference, ruling out restrictions on capital and currency movements out of Russia.

Making clear his aim was to soothe worried investors, he later began a question-and-answer session by saying with a wry smile: "All I have to do is smile to show the devil is not as frightening as he seems."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law ratifying a historic treaty, committing Russia to an economic union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Eurasian Economic Union will come into effect in January 2015.

Putin's signature in the document puts the final dot in Russia's ratification of the union which will be in place on January 1, 2015, as the other union states are expected to complete ratification in the next few days.

The economic union is the next step of integration within the Customs Union between the three countries. The agreement had previously been ratified by the Russian State Duma and the Federal Council of Russia.

It will help cut trade barriers and be the largest common market in the ex-Soviet sphere, comprising over 170 million people. The troika of countries will cooperate in energy, industry, agriculture, and transport. The ruble will become the de facto currency of the organization, although each country will still keep their local currency.

Financial integration is a major part of the agreement, while Russian, which is very widely spoken in both Belarus and Kazakhstan, will be the working language of the union. The headquarters of the union will be in Moscow, with the courts in Minsk, and Almaty will be the home of the financial regulatory body.

Citizens of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan will have the right to work freely throughout the member states without the need for a work permit. Over the last three years trade within the Customs Union has increased by $23 billion, or by nearly 50 percent. At the end of 2013, it stood at $66.2 billion.

Belarus and Kazakhstan are in third place in foreign trade with the Russian Federation, after the EU and China.

Going...going...almost gone, but let's not forget him
Good riddance!

Eric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.

A corporate lawyer with the A-list Washington and Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights, his overseeing. and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation's police forces, his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them, threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face US treason charges), and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.

But Holder, who came into his position as the nation's top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation's biggest so-called "too-big-to-fail" banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the US but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.

Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street's banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes; he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes -- civil cases that in almost all cases allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks' stocks and hurt "innocent" shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevolence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions -- even billions -- of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week, Obama sounded less statesman and more salesman, with the usual pitch that American leadership is all benevolent and virtuous. America is pursuing, America is committed, America is prepared... and so on and on went the tiresome egocentric rhetoric.

But like a dodgy salesman, the "goods" that Obama is hawking are downright fake. Caveat Emptor: buy it at your peril. Not only that, but the entire presentation to the potential buyers is littered with sly mendacity and ridiculous falsification of world events.

The US president used his address to the 69th UN session not to genuinely explore a collective solution to pressing world problems but rather as an opportunity to indulge in "American exceptionalism" - the deluded notion that America is magnificent and superior to all other nations. Obama's speech was a breathtaking falsification of the real causes underlying many of the security threats facing the world, and an opportunity for him to shift the blame on to others.

As Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov pointed out, Obama disgracefully labelled Russia as a global threat along with the Ebola epidemic in Africa and Islamic State terrorism in the Middle East.

Obama told UN delegates: "As we gather here, an outbreak of Ebola overwhelms public health systems in West Africa, and threatens to move rapidly across borders. Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition. The brutality of terrorists in Syria and Iraq forces us to look into the heart of darkness."

He then went on to corral the rest of the world under American leadership. "We call upon others to join us on the right side of history - for while small gains can be won at the barrel of a gun, they will ultimately be turned back if enough voices support the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions."

It was an astounding distortion of history in which the culpable role of the US in multiple conflicts is glibly airbrushed out of the picture, replaced by Russia in the case of Ukraine, instead of acknowledging the destabilising role that Washington played by orchestrating a coup in that country.

Syrian Electronic Army hacked the Twitter account of the UNICEF to share the news of bomb blast in a Syrian school which killed 49 children

The pro-Assad hackers Syrian Electronic Army today hacked the Twitter account of UNICEF to share news of the bomb blasts in Homs, Ikrema (Syria) which took life of 49 children all under 12 years of age.

© Unknown
Tweets sent by Syrian Electronic Army from the UNICEF’s twitter Account

After taking over the Twitter account, SEA fired a total of 6 tweets from the hacked Twitter Account of UNICEF. Out of these 6 tweets, 3 tweets were in English and other 3 in Arabic but the text of the message was same.The UNICEF's Twitter admin were quick to notice the hack and all the tweets were soon deleted. Later on, UNICEF accepted and confirmed the hack through this tweet.

We begin with CBS News. The president of CBS News, David Rhodes, of course has a brother named Ben. Benny Rhodes, born 1977, serves as an Obama confidante and national security adviser.

Russ Baker thinks Benny strange, and wonders, with ample justification and in connection with a New York Times "profiles in power" article about Benny:

"What's especially strange about the article is that, for those of us who continue to wonder how a virtual cipher rose so quickly from the Illinois legislature to become the most powerful person in the world, we end up wondering the same thing about an aspiring novelist from New York City who fairly catapults to enormous influence in shaping policy regarding some of the most complex and sensitive matters facing this country.

Somehow, beyond noting that "In many ways, Mr. Rhodes is an improbable choice for a job at the heart of the national security apparatus," the Times is not sufficiently curious about any of this to probe further."

In addition to the CBS link, perhaps this is all we really need to know about Benny: as Baker points out, Benny helped draft the collection of lies and omissions that is the 9/11 commission report.

So what about "Khorasan"?

Just when we thought the jokes and lies couldn't get any sicker and thicker, we get, via CBS, a new figurative, yet also polysemously literal, present: "Khorasan." Of course, the "new", to be sure, is also by now rather old. Do have a look; we've got yet another recycling of the bin Laden/Emmanuel Goldstein image, this time associated with the out-of-thin-air Khorasan group. CBS kindly informs us that "an expert on Al-Qaeda" (who is undoubtedly also expert in the knowledge of Eurasia, Eastasia, and telescreens) "says they [Khorasan] are following bin Laden's vision."

Thank goodness, though, for the Pentagon and CIA bombings in Syria, since, as CBS relays, Khorasan "was nearing", per Lt. Gen. William Mayville (director of operations for the joint chiefs of staff), "the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the homeland." Correspondingly, we have more scare-talk regarding stuff like toothpaste and airplanes.

Could Khorasan conceivably have something to do with the 9/11 and 9/19 White House fence jumpers/intruders? Very conceivably indeed, and shortly we will turn to data and theory in support of this contention.

The birther fringe has been touting some highly dubious "evidence" that Michelle Obama was born a man and so is biologically incapable of being the mother of her own children. The conspiracy theory is based on the alleged lack of publicly available photos of Barack and Michelle Obama's daughters, Sasha and Malia, when they were babies or very young - although adherents freely admit the First Family prefers to limit the girls' exposure to the media.

"Barack Obama and the First Lady have kept a tight lid on photos of their precious daughters being released by the press," writes Jodi Swann at Mr. Conservative. "Still, we have seen a startling lack of pictures from the early years of Malia and Sasha. Now we have evidence that this may not be due to the fact that Michelle has ordered the press not to release them, but that they do not exist."

She cites a blog post from last year at Fellowship of the Minds that speculates the girls were adopted - "possibly from Morocco."

That blogger, who goes by the name Dr. Eowyn, claims to have performed a Google image search for baby pictures of the girls and found none, although the blog's readers found several that were quickly dismissed as obvious forgeries. Dr. Eowyn also noted that Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com, which the blogger paid $9.95 for a trial membership, turned up no birth records or other personal information about the president's minor children. Birther litigant Orly Taitz claimed to Dr. Eowyn she has proof at least one of the girls was adopted from Morocco.

Conservatives are demanding that Ruth Bader Ginsburg should recuse herself from hearing abortion cases on the U.S. Supreme Court after she made remarks about a restrictive Texas law. The Supreme Court justice said in a lengthy interview with The New Republic that the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision would be a "worst-case" scenario - particularly for non-affluent women.

"Any woman who has the wherewithal to travel, to take a plane, to take a train to a state that provides access to abortion - that woman will never have a problem,"Ginsburg said. "It doesn't matter what Congress or the state legislatures do, there will be other states that provide this facility, and women will have access to it if they can pay for it. Women who can't pay are the only women who would be affected."

Conservatives were most upset when she said state legislatures and courts could not be trusted to ensure poor women had access to reproductive health services.

"How could you trust legislatures in view of the restrictions states are imposing?" Ginsburg said. "Think of the Texas legislation that would put most clinics out of business."

Conservative law professor Josh Blackman said Ginsburg's comments about the Texas law, which is currently being challenged in the 5th Circuit Court and could go before the U.S. Supreme Court, were problematic.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that more than 400 bodies have been discovered in mass graves near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, in what he described as "horrific" evidence that pointed to a war crime.

"This is obviously a war crime. Already more than 400 bodies have been discovered in [mass] graves outside Donetsk and we hope that western capitals will not hush up these facts [because] they're horrific," Lavrov said, adding there was an apparent blackout of the incident in Western mass media.

Last week, several mass graves filled with bodies of massacred civilians and independence supporters, killed execution-style, were unearthed 35 kilometers northeast of Donetsk.

"I expect [to hear] a clear, unbiased and responsible response from international organizations. OSCE is already working at the scene. We will make the truth known and, of course, make sure that the justice is done," Sergei Lavrov said at a press conference.

Speaking at PACE's fall session in Strasbourg on Tuesday, Russian lawmaker Olga Kazakova called on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to keep an eye on the investigation into this horrendous massacre.

The independence supporters of southeastern Ukraine believe that the civilians were murdered by the National Guard fighters who had stayed in the village of Nyzhnia Krynka, near the city of Donetsk, where the graves had been discovered, since April. Ukrainian authorities later denied this accusation, saying that not a single National Guard fighter had been in the area, adding however that some other Ukrainian units were deployed there at the time.

Lavrov commented on Kiev's recent claim to conduct an open and impartial probe of the alleged massacre as soon as it regained control of the area, saying it was pure hypocrisy because "these crimes were obviously perpetrated there at the time when Ukrainian security forces were in control of this region."

Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed the need to exclude the opportunity for the Ukrainian government forces to shell civilians in the country's eastern regions, speaking with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Kremlin said in a press release Thursday.

"V.V. [Vladimir Vladimirovich] Putin has emphasized the need for further prevention of shelling of civilian objects by the Ukrainian [military] units in southeastern Ukraine," the statement reads.

According to the press release, Russian and German leaders also agreed on the importance of sticking to the agreements, reached during the meetings of the Contact Group on Ukraine in Minsk; first and foremost, on the clauses concerning the withdrawal of heavy weapons and the monitoring of the situation by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

On Wednesday, the authorities of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic said the shelling of a school and a public transport stop in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk had killed 11. A representative for a local hospital has told RIA Novosti some 40 had been wounded in the artillery fire. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has condemned the shelling.