After a 13-year-old boy reported in 1979 that a priest raped him and later threatened him at gunpoint to keep quiet, the Archdiocese of Chicago assured the boy's parents that although the cleric avoided prosecution, he would receive treatment and have no further contact with minors.

But the Rev. William Cloutier, who already had been accused of molesting other children, was returned to ministry a year later and accused of more abuse before he resigned in 1993, two years after the boy's parents filed a lawsuit. Officials took no action against Cloutier over his earliest transgressions because he "sounded repentant," according to internal archdiocese documents released Tuesday that show how the archdiocese tried to contain a mounting scandal over child sexual abuse.

For decades, those at the highest levels of the nation's third-largest archdiocese moved accused priests from parish to parish while hiding the clerics' histories from the public. The documents, released through settlements between attorneys for the archdiocese and victims, describe how the late Cardinals John Cody and Joseph Bernardin often approved the reassignments. The archdiocese removed some priests from ministry, but often years or decades after the clergy were known to have molested children.

While disturbing stories of clergy sexual abuse have wrenched the Roman Catholic Church across the globe, the newly released documents offer the broadest look yet into how one of its largest and most prominent American dioceses responded to the scandal.

The case of Daniel Holihan is especially alarming. Holihan has been accused of abusing at least 20 victims, but was never prosecuted after the archdiocese persuaded the state's attorney to not pursue charges.

The upheavals of the "Dieudonné case" highlighted the power of the pro-Israel lobby inside the French State (see here the analysis of Jacob Cohen). A departure from precedent at the Council of State (Supreme Court), which made its decision in a hurry and under pressure from LICRA (read here), massive deployments of police forces around comedy venues and cultural arenas, fiscal and judicial harassment, planned closure of his YouTube channel and eviction from his own theater, not to mention the full range of political and media establishment against him (see here)... guilty of Zionist dissent, nothing has been spared against Dieudonné.

This campaign benefited from the firepower of CRIF and LICRA, ideological state apparatuses (see my post here on this issue) and the mainstream media, but also from auxiliary forces, including the Ligue de Défense Juive [Jewish Defense League]. Terrorizing, beating, and insulting spectators and acquaintances of Dieudonné at truly punitive expeditions outside La Main d'Or theater in Paris - for which, needless to say, police forces are not mobilized for the occasion, and who do not lift a finger to help victims of violence (see here) - this paramilitary militia already has a long history behind it, dotted with violence and abuse of all kinds.

• Tony Blair was 'dining with friends and family' at Tramshed, east London

• DJ and barman Twiggy Garcia attempted arrest for crimes against peace

• Was inspired to do so after reading site arrestblair.org

A barman tried to put Tony Blair under a citizen's arrest while the former Prime Minister was out having dinner.

Blair was eating at Tramshed in east London when Twiggy Garcia approached him.

The part-time producer said he put his hand on his shoulder and said 'Mr Blair, this is a citizen's arrest for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq.'

'Monsanto's reign of intimidation is allowed to continue in rural America,' says Food Democracy Now!'s Dave Murphy

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a group of farmers the right to challenge Monsanto's seed patents, a decision critics charge allows the biotech giant's "reign of intimidation" to continue.

The plaintiffs in the suit, Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) et al v. Monsanto, sought to protect themselves from lawsuits by the corporation for patent infringement should Monsanto's genetically engineered seed contaminate the farmers' crops.

Monsanto has sued over 100 farmers for patent infringement.

Jim Gerritsen, president of lead plaintiff OSGATA, previously explained,

"We are not customers of Monsanto. We don't want their seed. We don't want their gene-spliced technology. We don't want their trespass onto our farms. We don't want their contamination of our crops. We don't want to have to defend ourselves from aggressive assertions of patent infringement because Monsanto refuses to keep their pollution on their side of the fence. We want justice."

Decree gives security agencies the power to impose curfews, detain suspects without charge and censor media

Thailand has announced a two-month state of emergency in Bangkok and neighbouring provinces in response to protests that have seen nine people killed and hundreds injured amid calls for the government to resign.

Anti-government protesters have taken to the streets of the capital since November, cutting off water and power to ministers' homes, besieging government ministries, and forcing the beleaguered prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, to rule from offices north of the capital in their attempt to oust her from power.

"The cabinet decided to invoke the emergency decree to take care of the situation and to enforce the law," said deputy prime minister Surapong Tovichaikul on Tuesday.

History is often written to benefit certain groups over others.

Indeed, you will often find the blame for some of the worst events in history placed on the wrong individuals or factors. Most Americans today continue to argue over liberal vs. conservative beliefs, unaware that the vast majority of economy ills plaguing the country originate in neither party but in the Federal Reserve, which has debased the US Dollar by over 95% in the 20th century alone.

With that in mind, I want to consider what actually caused the hyperinflationary period in Weimar Germany. Please consider the quote from Niall Ferguson's book, "The Ascent of Money" regarding what really happened there:

Yet it would be wrong to see the hyperinflation of 1923 as a simple consequence of the Versailles Treaty. That was how the Germans liked to see it, of course...All of this was to overlook the domestic political roots of the monetary crisis. The Weimar tax system was feeble, not least because the new regime lacked legitimacy among higher income groups who declined to pay the taxes imposed on them.

At the same time, public money was spent recklessly, particularly on generous wage settlements for public sector unions. The combination of insufficient taxation and excessive spending created enormous deficits in 1919 and 1920 (in excess of 10 per cent of net national product), before the victors had even presented their reparations bill... Moreover, those in charge of Weimar economic policy in the early 1920s felt they had little incentive to stabilize German fiscal and monetary policy, even when an opportunity presented itself in the middle of 1920.

A common calculation among Germany's financial elites was that runaway currency depreciation would force the Allied powers into revision the reparations settlement, since the effect would be to cheapen German exports.

What the Germans overlooked was that the inflation induced boom of 1920-22, at a time when the US and UK economies were in the depths of a post-war recession, caused an even bigger surge in imports, thus negating the economic pressure they had hoped to exert. At the heart of the German hyperinflation was a miscalculation.

You'll note the frightening similarities to the US's monetary policy today. We see:

• Syria crisis: evidence of 'industrial-scale killing' by regime spurs call for war crimes charges
• Senior war crimes prosecutors say photographs and documents provide 'clear evidence' of systematic killing of 11,000 detainees

Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the "systematic killing" of about 11,000 detainees, according to three eminent international lawyers.

The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of regime security forces from March 2011 to last August.

Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.

The UN and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both Bashar al-Assad's government and rebels, but experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.

Refiners in Asia, Europe and Russia are shipping around half a million tonnes of heating oil and diesel to the United States this month after bitterly cold weather sharply reduced oil stocks there.

At least a dozen tankers have been booked so far in January to ship gasoil and diesel to the U.S. East Coast, according to traders and shipping data.

The majority of the tankers, or around 300,000 tonnes of oil product, originated from the Baltic Sea and Black Sea.

One tanker, the 100,000-tonne Torm Valborg, was chartered by Reliance , which operates the world's biggest refining complex in western India.

Around three medium-range tankers were booked from Europe on the west-bound transatlantic route, traders said.

Also, around five cargoes of jet fuel heading from the Middle East and Asia to Europe were diverted to the United States in recent days, with several likely to discharge in Florida, traders said.

"U.S. East Coast heating oil stocks are low at the commercial level and are being reduced at the consumer level. That market should remain tight and can't get much incremental supply from the U.S. Gulf due to the Jones Act restricting transport between the two regions by vessel," said Olivier Jakob, analyst at Zug, Switzerland-based Petromatrix.

In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised". They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.

This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.

But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.

Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat ... senior intelligence officials like matinee idols".

Constitutional scholar Dr. Edwin Vieira sits down with Gary Franchi and answers the question... Has the US Government "become destructive of these ends?"