Thousands of recently highly paid workers have been laid off after the oil price plummeted 50 percent in 2014. At least four American oil-producing states are already facing budget problems due to decreasing oil revenues.

The price plunge has affected petroleum production in all oil-extracting countries, including the US.

Currently cheap fuel is still believed to be providing an overall boost to the US economy, as consumers can spend less on gasoline and more on shopping and services. But for the American energy sector the future looks less bright. It's effecting places like Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, the New York Times reports.

Last month, Yevgeny Alexeyevich Fedorov, Deputy of the Russian State Duma and the coordinator of the National Liberation Movement for restoring sovereignty of Russia (http://eafedorov.ru/), delivered an impassioned interview regarding the role of the Russian Central Bank in Western plans to displace Putin by fomenting Maidan-style protest through economic attack - all part of a larger Western fifth column attack designed to bring Russian wealth/resources (one third of the World's wealth) under Western control.

The Youtube video description reads:

"Economic hardship is being created by the foreign-controlled Bank of Russia's monetary policies, to spread mass discontent and facilitate a Maidan in 2015 to remove Putin. So claims Evgeny Fedorov, citing the colonialist Central Bank law, established after Washington's victory in the Cold War, and the system of fifth-column levers, methodically operated to steer the revolution."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new military doctrine, naming NATO expansion among key external risks, the Kremlin said on Friday, days after Ukraine made fresh steps to join the Atlantic military alliance.

Moscow's previous military doctrine, signed by Putin in 2010, also identified NATO expansion as a top risk to Russia, but the stakes have risen sharply over the past year.

Russia said this week NATO was turning Ukraine into a "frontline of confrontation" and threatened to sever remaining ties if Ukraine's hopes of joining NATO were realized.

The Kiev parliament's renunciation of Ukraine's neutral status on Tuesday in pursuit of NATO membership has outraged Moscow and deepened the worst confrontation between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War after Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula this year.

NATO has already boosted its military presence in eastern Europe this year, saying it has evidence that Russia orchestrated and armed a pro-Russian rebellion in eastern Ukraine that followed the overthrow of a Kremlin-backed president in Kiev.

Moscow denies supporting the rebellion, and is currently trying, along with Kiev and the rebels, to renew efforts to find a political solution to the crisis in eastern Ukraine.

It is likely to take years for Ukraine to meet the technical criteria for accession to NATO and, even then, there is no certainty that the alliance is ready to take such a decision.

A NATO official said on Friday the alliance respected the move by Ukraine's parliament, and so should Russia.

"Should Ukraine decide to apply for NATO membership, NATO will assess its readiness to join the Alliance in the same way as with any candidate. This is an issue between NATO and the individual countries aspiring to membership."

Russia's vision of the Eurasian Union is one in which it sits at the center of an interconnected supercontinent, with Moscow taking the initiative in bringing all sides closer together for their joint and multivectoral benefit.

The West's confrontation with Russia and the New Cold War may actually have been a blessing in disguise, as ever since then, Moscow has been propelled with a renewed sense of urgency to probe and clinch major deals all across Eurasia. Stretching from the coasts of Vietnam to the world's most populous Arab country, Egypt, it feels as though Russian diplomacy is omnipresent nowadays. The purpose behind Russia's pan-Eurasian foreign policy push is to cement an alternative political and economic arrangement to challenge Western dominance and facilitate the birth of a truly multipolar world.

From Network Diplomacy...

The underlying basis of Russia's foreign policy successes has been that all of its strategic partners, in one way or another, understand the necessity of a multipolar world in order to safeguard their full sovereignty (cultural, political, historic, etc.). Incidentally, it was the US and its own foreign policy fumblings (especially in the post-9/11 era) that convinced most of the world that multipolarity was their only practical option for survival in the 21^st century. Working with the West carries with it certain privileged benefits (as Saudi Arabia and its Gulf clients know firsthand), but a non-Western state's existence within this system is tenuous, and once its leader's utility inevitably expires (as Mubarak's did) or the state refuses to follow essential unipolar dictates (like Gaddafi's Libya did), then the country is done away with, destroyed, and redefined as a dystopia.

Even before the 'Arab Spring' theater-wide Color Revolutions, this nefarious objective was apparent to Russia and China, which entered into a strategic partnership in 1997 in order to help one another build the multipolar world. Shortly thereafter, they transformed the Shanghai Five into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in order to safeguard themselves and their allies against the asymmetrical Western weapons of terrorism, separatism, and extremism (political, religious, economic [sanctions], etc.). A few years later, the emerging economic reality in the non-Western world led to the bestowing of the BRICS moniker, which quickly evolved into an dynamic political and economic grouping dedicated to multipolarity.

In order to bridge any potential rivalry and divergence between its two largest members, Russia solidified its strategic partnerships with China and India, forming the geopolitical glue of trust that has kept either of them from completely falling for the tempting and Brzezinski-esque Western trap of intra-BRICS conflict. It's not to say that this doesn't exist to some level, but by Russia positioning itself as the mediator via its bilateral partnerships with both, it joins them closer together than if it hadn't, and it also provides a trustful go-between intermediary in case tensions risk boiling over some time in the future. Seen from another angle, the SCO and BRICS form the institutional cores of multipolarity in the Eurasian supercontinent, while the Russian-Chinese and Russian-Indian Strategic Partnerships provide the bilateral boosts to this process. Supplementary to these Eurasian anchors' agreement on the world's destiny, each of their own lesser (but no less important) strategic partnerships, such as the Russian-Iranian and Chinese-Pakistani ones, add a deeper network vector to this global vision and work to erode unipolar hegemony.

Officials from Washington, Tokyo and Seoul will sign a trilateral intelligence-sharing pact in an effort to strengthen their surveillance network on the nuclear-armed pariah state of North Korea, Seoul officials said.

Although the United States already shares intelligence on North Korean activities separately with South Korea and Japan, the trilateral agreement marks a historic partnership for the three nations.

Due to historic tensions connected to Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, the sharing of intelligence between Tokyo and Seoul marks a significant step forward in bilateral relations between the two Pacific powers.

In April, President Obama's Asia tour seemed to have succeeded in reducing regional tensions over historical and territorial issues hampering Washington's efforts at trilateral cooperation.

During his visit, the US leader gave Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assurances that the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which have been a matter of controversy with China, are Japanese territory. Obama thus became the first US president to have "overtly stated that the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands fall within the purview of the US-Japan security treaty," the Diplomat reported.


Later, at a press conference with South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Obama touched upon the sensitive subject of so-called comfort women - females forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, which was "a terrible, egregious violation of human rights."

These statements soothed historic tensions and helped seal the deal between Seoul and Tokyo.

According to the agreement, to be signed on Monday, South Korean and Japanese officials will share intelligence on Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs, via Washington, South Korea's Defense Ministry said in a statement, AP reported.

On October 9, 2006, North Korea stunned the world when it carried out its first underground nuclear test, followed by a second test almost three years later. On February 12, 2013, the closed communist country announced it had conducted its third underground nuclear test in seven years, although Japanese and South Korean investigators had failed to detect any radiation.

To wrap of 2014, The Truth Perspective reviewed some of the global trends in the world over the past year. Among the many topics discussed in this year-end show are: Israel's laws and its progression into an exclusively Jewish State, the IDF's attack of Gaza, the developments in Ferguson Missouri, police state U.S.A., flight MH17, the Ebola scare, and more. The hosts also discussed a few things about Christmas you may not know which add to the earlier program about early Christianity.

Running Time: 01:48:00

Download: MP3

"The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions." - (Professor Robert Briffault. The Making of Humanity. London, 1918)

Leader across the globe use the Xmas and the New Year's Eve as convenient opportunities to echo festive messages of peace and optimism as if they long the humanity. Despite the inherent wickedness of warmongers and institutions, the global community is tolerant and open to listening to the abstract and absurd alike. Analyzing critically and objectively, there is hardly any international leaders capable of articulating an effective and credible message of hope and change under the present global affairs. No matter where you look to the East and West, South and North, forces of darkness and evil go unchecked as if the mankind was just numbers and digits and nothing else in reality.

Five civilians were killed and as many wounded in a NATO airstrike in the Baraki Barak district of central Logar province, the town's administrative chief said on Friday.

Eng. Rahim Amin told Pajhwok Afghan News the air assault took place late on Thursday night in Abjosh area.

The airstrike came amid an ongoing offensive by Afghan security forces in the area, he said. Amin said he could not confirm if foreign forces had conducted the airstrike on their own or it had been requested by Afghan forces.

Acting Governor Niaz Muhammad Amiri said: "Foreign forces wanted to target a group of militants but unfortunately they hit a house inflicting casualties on civilians."

Amnesty International has found that "the already desperate situation in eastern Ukraine is being made even worse by" so-called 'volunteer' or mercenary forces for the Ukrainian Government, which are blocking the supply of food to residents in that region, and trying to starve them to death.

Thus, "The region is facing a humanitarian disaster with many already at risk of starvation," said Denis Krivosheev, acting Director of Europe and Central Asia for Amnesty International, on Wed., December 24th.

Amnesty International reports that, "Over half of the population in these areas are now entirely dependent on food aid."

The AI report quotes one commander of these mercenary forces as giving his reason for blocking the humanitarian supplies, as being: "We're at war with them and we're spilling our blood, but in the same time we're feeding them"; so, they refuse to allow the aid convoys through.

Germany's Nazi forces during World War II gave the same explanation for why they treated the entire population in their conquered regions as being the enemy: they were the enemy, to be exploited and not served; they were thus to be cleared out, or else slaughtered, in order to provide "lebensraum" for the conquering people ('Aryans'), who would be moving in and taking over the natural and other resources of the region, to be used by the Nazi state. (In the present instance, gas is one of the main resources in the rebelling region, which is the site of the vast Yuzivska gas field, and Obama's people want it; and one of the Obama team's appointed leaders there, the billionaire Ihor Kolomoysky, hired Joe Biden's son and a friend of John Kerry for the board of his gas-exploration company.)

Blaming Russia is all too easy when it comes to the war in Ukraine. Here's what mainstream media in the West are missing.

The Globe and Mail is the only newspaper in Canada spending time and resources to report from the war zone of eastern Ukraine. Seasoned Globe reporter Mark MacKinnon has been in and out of there for many months, and in late November had a substantial article that provides a useful reference point for examining how mainstream media present the story of the war in Ukraine to Canadians.

Canada has been an enthusiastic partner with the U.S. and European Union in supporting the right-wing government that came into power in Ukraine last February, following the overthrow of the elected president. The new government went to war against its population in the east of the country (the region called Donbas) in April. That was its response to popular demands for more political autonomy and democracy for the region. Kyiv calls its war an "anti-terrorist operation."