The Russian foreign minister issued a blistering attack on the West and Nato on Saturday, accusing them of being unable to change their Cold War "genetic code" and saying the United States must abandon its claims to "eternal uniqueness."

Sergey Lavrov's assault appeared to be an extension of the increasingly anti-Western stance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is riding a wave of popularity at home with his neo-nationalist rhetoric and policies.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Lavrov said the crisis in Ukraine was the result of a coup d'etat in that country backed by the United States and the European Union for the purpose of pulling Kiev out of its "organic role as a binding link" between East and West, denying it the opportunity for "neutral and non-bloc status."

Lavrov also said the Russian annexation of Crimea earlier this year was the choice of the largely Russian-speaking population there. Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred control over the strategic Black Sea region to Ukraine from Moscow in the 1950s.

While the rhetoric was tough, Andrew Weiss, a top Russia expert at the Carnegie Foundation, said the Lavrov speech "hewed closely to themes the Russians have put forward throughout the Ukraine crisis."

While U.S. military sources claimed the latest airstrikes were a success, a human rights monitor has reported only civilians were among the dead.

As the United States continued airstrikes against the Islamic State (I.S.) group on Sunday, Republican house speaker John Boehner has warned the U.S. may have "no choice" but to deploy ground forces to battle the militants.

"At some point, somebody's boots have to be on the ground," Boehner told ABC News on Sunday. Describing I.S. fighters as "barbarians," the top House Republican claimed "at the end of the day, I think it's gonna take more than air strikes to drive them outta there."

"They intend to kill us. And if we don't destroy them first, we're gonna pay the price," he stated.

President Barack Obama has claimed no U.S. ground troops will be sent to Iraq and Syria to battle I.S, though the Pentagon has already dispatched over 1000 U.S. troops to Iraq. It says the troops will only provide support to Iraqi security forces.


However, Boehner's warning that ground troops could soon be inevitable is just the latest in a wave of Republican outcry against Obama's pledge to keep the United States from entering another Middle Eastern quagmire.

Earlier in September, Republican senator Lindsey Graham warned I.S. is an "army" that is "intending to come here." Graham claimed that if U.S. ground troops aren't sent to battle I.S., "we all" could be "killed" by the militant group.

"If they survive our best shot ... then they will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world," Graham warned.

Currently, I.S.'s operational capacity is largely limited to Iraq and Syria, where they were hit with another wave of U.S.-led airstrikes on Sunday. At least three oil refineries were hit by airstrikes near the I.S. stronghold Raqqa.

The ISIL or IS threat is a smokescreen. The strength of the ISIL has deliberately been inflated to get public support for the Pentagon and to justify the illegal bombing of Syria. It has also been used to justify the mobilization of what is looking more and more like a large-scale US-led military buildup in the Middle East. The firepower and military assets being committed go beyond what is needed for merely fighting the ISIL death squads.

While the US has assured its citizens and the world that troops will not be sent on the ground, this is very unlikely. In the first instance, it is unlikely because boots on the ground are needed to monitor and select targets. Moreover, Washington sees the campaign against the ISIL fighters as something that will take years. This is doublespeak. What is being described is a permanent military deployment or, in the case of Iraq, redeployment. This force could eventually morph into a broader assault force threatening Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.

US-Syrian and US-Iranian Security Dialogue?

Before the US-led bombings in Syria started there were unverified reports being circulated that Washington had started a dialogue with Damascus through Russian and Iraqi channels to discuss military coordination and the Pentagon bombing campaign in Syria. There was something very off though. Agents of confusion were at work in an attempt to legitimize the bombardment of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The claims of US-Syrian cooperation via Russian and Iraqi channels are part of a sinister series of misinformation and disinformation. Before the claims about US cooperation with Syria, similar claims were being made about US-Iranian cooperation in Iraq.

Earlier, Washington and the US media tried to give the impression that an agreement on military cooperation was made between itself and Tehran to fight ISIL and to cooperate inside Iraq. This was widely refuted in the harshest of words by numerous members of the Iranian political establishment and high-ranking Iranian military commanders as disinformation.

After the Iranians clearly indicated that Washington's claims were fiction, the US claimed that it would not be appropriate for Iran to join its anti-ISIL coalition. Iran rebutted. Washington was dishonestly misrepresenting the facts, because US officials had asked Tehran to join the anti-ISIL coalition several times.

You would think war-themed video games copy real life, and not the other way around. Not this time. A Washington think tank has hired the maker of the acclaimed "Call of Duty" game to envision the kind of future wars the US could be fighting.

The key reason for this, according to the Atlantic Council think tank, is that, with all its money and capabilities, America really isn't thinking creatively about the various threats it could face in the 21st century.


Dave Anthony, the creator of the billion-dollar Call of Duty franchise, will be joining other authors, screenwriters and entertainment figures in an initiative called 'The Art of Future War Project,' set to launch next week, according to AFP.

The idea came rather suddenly, when former Pentagon official Steven Grundman walked in on his son playing 'Call of Duty: Black Ops II,' which depicts a 2025 cold war between China and the United States. In it, the two superpowers are vying for rare earth elements in secret missions.

"He was struck how realistic our portrayal in 'Call of Duty: Black Ops II' was of a future conflict," Anthony told the news agency.

"It occurred to me that the perspective of artists on this question is compelling and insightful, and it's also different," Grundman was cited as saying by the Washington Post. "One feature that struck me was the combination of both familiar technologies and novel ones."

"I didn't want to satisfy myself with an approach everyone was doing," he added. "It's a crowded field of ideas," Grundman said, explaining his belief why military think tanks alone aren't up to the task.

According to Anthony, the game itself was the result of brainstorming by a number of creative professionals of all sorts, including Batman screenwriter David Goyer, as well as Oliver North, the former marine who later became a TV personality at the height of the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, when US officials secretly sold weapons to the Islamic state, despite there being an arms embargo.

"You get everybody in a room like that, and all the different perspectives come together," Goyer said. "That combination was fascinating. What I would like to bring to Washington is that kind of thinking."

Anthony himself also believes that the real-world Pentagon could benefit from fantasy-based thinking for the simple reason that the US isn't preparing even for the scenarios it knows it might face, often on the pretext that there isn't adequate funding, or that certain bridges can be crossed when reached.

The face of Hong Kong's student democracy movement came under furious attack by a pro-Beijing newspaper today, upping the ante in the fight over the former British colony's political future.

On Thursday, Wen Wei Po published an "expose" into what it described as the U.S. connections of Joshua Wong, the 17 year-old leader of student group Scholarism.

The story asserts that "U.S. forces" identified Mr. Wong's potential three years ago, and have worked since then to cultivate him as a "political superstar."

Evidence for Mr. Wong's close ties to the U.S. that the paper cited included what the report described as frequent meetings with U.S. consulate personnel in Hong Kong and covert donations from Americans to Mr. Wong. As evidence, the paper cited photographs leaked by "netizens." The story also said Mr. Wong's family visited Macau in 2011 at the invitation of the American Chamber of Commerce, where they stayed at the "U.S.-owned" Venetian Macao, which is owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp.

When asked about Wen Wei Po's allegations that he was being manipulated by U.S. forces, Mr. Wong denied the idea. "Of course it's false," Mr. Wong told China Real Time. In a subsequent statement posted online, Mr. Wong denied every detail in Wen Wei Po's story. The American Chamber of Commerce said no spokesperson was available to comment. The U.S. consulate in Hong Kong also declined to comment.

Mr. Wong came to local fame in 2012 after his Scholarism group, made up of secondary school students, protested against a plan by the Hong Kong government to implement "patriotic education" classes in Hong Kong schools. The plan was later shelved. Now, the group is at the forefront of a student movement protesting against a decision by Beijing last month that said that future candidates for Hong Kong's top post must be vetted by central authorities.

Publicly announcing that US intelligence agencies "underestimated" the presence and activity of Islamic State militants in Syria, US President Barack Obama in an interview with CBS called the country a "ground zero" for international jihadists.

"Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," Obama said in an interview made on Friday but aired on Sunday.

The US-led Western block rejects the principle of the equality of sovereign states secured by the UN Charter while advocating democracy in the international arena, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addressing the UNGA.

"The US-led Western alliance, while acting as an advocate of democracy, rule of law and human rights in individual countries, is acting in the international arena from the opposite position, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign right of states enshrined in the UN Charter and trying to decide for others what is good and what is bad," Lavrov said at the 69th session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Saturday.

The Russian foreign minister elaborated that there was an "increasingly obvious contradiction between the need for collective action by partners to produce proper responses to common challenges and some countries' drive for dominance and revival of the archaic bloc mentality based on barrack-like discipline and flawed 'us and them' logic".

For years, many people have suspected that the New York Fed is more or less controlled by the "too big to fail" banks. Well, now we have smoking gun evidence that this is indeed the case. A very brave lawyer named Carmen Segarra made a series of audio recordings while she was working for the New York Fed. The 46 hours of meetings and conversations that she recorded are being called "the Ray Rice video for the financial sector" because of the explosive content that they contain.

What these recordings reveal are regulators that are deeply afraid to do anything that may harm or embarrass Goldman Sachs. And it is quite understandable why Segarra's colleagues at the New York Fed would feel this way. As a recent Bloomberg article explained, it has become "common practice" for regulators to leave "their government jobs for much higher paying jobs at the very banks they were once meant to regulate." If you think that there is going to be a cushy, high paying banking job for you at the end of the rainbow, you are unlikely to do anything that will mess that up.

To say that the culture at the New York Fed is "deferential" to big banks such as Goldman Sachs would be a massive understatement.

Another mass grave has been found in eastern Ukraine by the Donbass self-defence forces near Nyzhnia Krynka village, days after the OSCE confirmed the discovery of 3 mass burials in areas recently abandoned by Kiev forces.

The new site of suspected murders is not far from the town of Makeevka, Donetsk People's Republic first deputy Prime Minister Andrey Purgin told Itar-Tass. The number of bodies and their identities have yet to be determined.

"Another grave discovered ... How many bodies and how these people died will be established during the exhumation," Purgin said.

An international monitoring mission has arrived at the new burial site, including experts from France and Russia, which insist on an immediate investigation of the suspected war crimes, RIA reports.

Several weeks ago, before a ceasefire was agreed, this area of Ukraine was under the control of the Ukrainian army and the National Guard's Aidar battalion. Earlier this month, an Amnesty International report has confirmed that war crimes including abductions, executions and extortion were committed by this particular Ukrainian battalion.

Last week RT crew went to investigate the previously discovered site where four bodies have been found buried in shell craters behind a burnt-out coal mine, days after the OSCE confirmed that three mass graves, allegedly with many bodies, have been found near Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine is broke, and that's the sad legacy of this year's tumult. The question now is: will its western "friends" and Russia save Kiev from the abyss?One day, during the credit-fueled economic madness of the early Noughties, I got a credit card in the post. I hadn't ordered it: the bank had just forwarded it without any prompting. That sounds crazy now, but was considered normal back then. I was a student and it wasn't Christmas, but it sure felt like it. Armed with my plastic pal and its €3,000 limit, I hit Dublin's luxury Brown Thomas store and purchased designer gear with all the intent of a puppy on amphetamine.

A few raucous nights out followed, "More champagne? No bother!" and a trip to Paris. Then reality dawned and I had to pay it back. That wasn't fun - in fact, it was extremely difficult. However, while grazing on baked beans and toast, I had my memories of the "good times."

Countries often experience similar short-term periods of paper wealth, followed by a humongous hangover when the debt collectors come calling. There are a myriad of current examples in Europe: Greece, Spain and my own Ireland for starters. Others didn't have much of a party, but still got the furry tongue - Hungary, Cyprus and Portugal spring to mind.

Nevertheless, there is one European state that bucks all trends by having had no shindig at all before getting its medicine from the markets - Ukraine. That is, unless you count a civil war, a violent revolution and a horrifically divided nation as a party. Incredibly, some in Ukraine actually do. To them, Maidan and its consequences is all a big celebration. Well, the hijinks are over now and the DJ has just played "My Way."

Ukraine is broke. It was already treading water before the "revolution" - helped by corruption that ranged from the small scale to the incredibly large. Now, however, it's completely banjaxed. Meanwhile, the "do-gooders" in the mainstream media ignore this while they crack on about "nation building" and "reforms."