For the ninth time, Russia is sending in another humanitarian aid convoy to E. Ukraine. As reported by TASS:

Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations has formed up in the Rostov region a convoy of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid for Ukraine's Donbass, the ministry's representative Oleg Voronov told TASS on Saturday.

"The convoy is ready to go. It unites over 100 trucks, which will deliver to Donbass over 1,200 tonnes of humanitarian aid," he said.

Food products and construction materials make most of the cargo, he added.

The ministry formed the cargo according to requests from authorities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The media could see the cargo in the trucks on Saturday. Reporters were free to pick a truck to see it carries only the declared cargo.

Russia has been consistently sending aid and not only to Ukraine, but to Palestine as well. All Poroshenko can say is "Donbass children can sit in cellars." Ugh, what a repulsive creature.

Gold is still in the news, as several European states have called for the repatriation of their gold bullion reserves held in the United States (and other foreign banks). As Aeneas Georg wrote in his recent SOTT Exclusive, Gold, gold, gold! Dutch gold boosted, Ukrainian gold looted, Russia buying BIG, Swiss vote gold-quake, the Dutch government has successfully, and secretly, repatriated 20% of its total gold holdings from the United States. (The U.S. still holds 31%.)

This trend comes at the same time as the revelation that the U.S. emptied the coffers in Ukraine, airlifting their gold reserves out of the country soon after the U.S.-backed coup early this year. (And following which, Iraq bought 36 tonnes of gold from the U.S., the biggest purchase by a country in three years.) Also, countries like Russia and China are buying up gold as fast as they can. Russia, in particular, is selling off oil in exchange for gold. (See: SOTT EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Russian economist Mikhail Khazin: On gold, the imminent collapse of Western neo-liberalism, and Eurasianism) As Dimitry Kalinichenko recently put it:

The twist of Putin's game is that the mechanism for the sale of Russian energy to the West only for gold now works regardless of whether the West agrees to pay for Russian oil and gas with its artificially cheap gold, or not.
...
Thus, in exchange for Russian oil, gas and uranium, the West pays Russia with dollars, purchasing power of which is artificially inflated against oil and gold by the efforts (manipulations) of the West. However, Putin uses these dollars only to withdraw physical gold from the West in exchange at a price denominated in US dollars, artificially lowered by the same West.
...
The problem of the West is that the stocks of physical gold in possession of the West are not unlimited. Therefore, the more the West devalues oil and gold against the US dollar, the faster it loses devaluing Gold from its not infinite reserves.
...
Thus, Russia poses a real threat to the American model of petrodollar world domination.

The other countries looking to get their gold back include Germany, Switzerland and France. And this is where things get interesting.

An Egyptian court has found former president Hosni Mubarak not guilty of conspiring to kill hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising, which led to his ouster. He was further exonerated on separate corruption charges.

Addressing journalists in attendance, chief judge Mahmud Kamel al-Rashidi warned the media they should reserve judgment until they had read the massive 1,430 verdict in its entirety.

The former leader had been charged along with seven of his former police commanders for the death of 239 protesters - a fraction of the 850 people activists believe died in the unrest. Judge al-Rashidi said the charges had been politically motivated and did not deserve to be tried in his court. Mubarak's interior minister Habib el-Adly and six aides were also found not guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.

It was a Malaysian jet, carrying Malaysian passengers, flown by Malaysian pilots, yet after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014, Malaysia has been systematically blocked from participating in the investigation, leaving an overwhelmingly pro-NATO bloc in charge of the evidence, investigation and outcome as well as the manner in which the investigation will be carried out.

Despite the integral role Malaysia has played during several pivotal moments in the aftermath of the disaster, it appears that the closer to the truth the investigation should be getting, the further Malaysia itself is being pushed from both the evidence and any influence it has on the likely conclusions of the investigation. With the downed aircraft in question being Malaysian, Malaysia as a partner in the investigation would seem a given. Its exclusion from the investigation appears to be an indication that the investigation's objectivity has been compromised and that the conclusions it draws will likely be politically motivated.

Is the US planning the occupation of Syria by training an unconventional insurgent invasion force?

Think regime change in Syria is off the drawing board? Think again. The bombing of the ISIL or ISIS in Syria is part of a brinkmanship campaign leading up to a potential non-conventional invasion, parallel to the re-introduction of the US military to Iraq.

The ISIL and the other anti-government forces in Iraq and Syria are not the only ones to disregard the Iraqi-Syrian border drawn by the British and French by Sykes-Picot in 1916. The US also disregarded the border and international law when it began to illegally bomb Syria.

The bombing campaign was not enough for some in the US Congress. In a joint statement on September 23, the arch-hawks US Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham called for US troops to be sent into Syria too. Both of them praised the Pentagon's illegal airstrikes in Syria and then argued for US ground troops as well.

Although McCain and Graham went out of their way to say that this would not be an occupation of either Syria or Iraq, this is almost exactly what they were calling for when they said that the military campaign had to also be directed against the Syrian government.

Since, and even before the calls for an invasion of Syria by McCain and Graham different suggestions have circulated about an invasion of Syria.

The dilemma is that Washington does not want the Pentagon to directly invade Syria itself. It wants to pull the strings while another force does the work on the ground. Candidates for an outsourced invasion of Syria include the Turkish military or other US regional allies. There, however is also an impasse here as Washington's allies are also afraid of the consequences of an invasion of Syria.

This is where a third opinion comes into the picture: the construction of a multinational insurgent army by the US.

At its meeting today in Vienna, Austria, the 12 member countries of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) voted to keep their output target unchanged despite a 30 percent slump in the oil price since June, due primarily to the explosive growth in fracking in the U.S. as well as decreasing global demand. While Venezuela made a case for an output reduction, Saudi Arabia, the world's leading oil producer and exporter, pressured to keep it the same.

The price immediately declined in response, dropping below $72 a barrel, a price last seen in August 2010.

"There's a price decline. That does not mean that we should really rush and do something," OPEC secretary general Abdallah Salem el-Badri told the BBC. "We don't want to panic. We want to see the market, how the market behaves, because the decline of the price does not reflect a fundamental change."

What's wrong with Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson's killing of the unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, Michael Brown, and with a Grand Jury decision not to indict him for that outrageous slaying, is what is wrong with American law enforcement and American "justice" in general.

Both actions were permeated not only with racism, which clearly played a huge rule in both the verdict rendered by a Grand Jury composed of nine whites and only three blacks, and in this tragic police killing by a white cop of a black child, but also by a mentality on the part of police - and apparently by at least a majority of the citizen jurors on a panel evaluating Wilson's actions - that cops are authorities who must be obeyed without question, on pain of death.

Let's recall the most crucial evidence in this killing: According to the New York Times it was two shots into the top of the head by Officer Wilson that killed Brown - shots that multiple witnesses confirm were fired after the unarmed Brown was on his knees, already seriously wounded by four other apparently non-lethal shots to arm, neck and upper right chest, with his hands raised and pleading "Don't shoot." The Times also reports that those shots, apparently fired when Brown's head was leaning forward, or from a position above him, appeared to have been fired "not from close range," a determination based upon an absence of gun powder residue around the area of the entry wounds.

On 25 November, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel titled "Rethinking the cost of Western intervention in Ukraine." It's actually pretty good, which makes it all the more curious. After all, if you follow WaPo, you'd more expect to find headlines such as the following (all culled from the past 2 weeks or so):

• Prove to Mr. Putin that he is not 'invincible'
• Russia unnerves its neighbors
• How the United States can counter the ambitions of Russia and China
• Putin: Speak politely, but carry guns, too
• Putin's combative course
• NATO says Russian military definitely moving into Ukraine

The Post is also one of the soap boxes for arch Russophobe and Putin-baser Masha Gessen. (Masha has a history of getting her facts wrong: she starts from the premise that Putin is evil, then interprets anything and everything as proof of that position.) So what exactly did Heuvel write, and what's really going on here?

When Save the Children chose to bestow the Global Legacy Award on Tony Blair, the charity inadvertently revealed the dark underbelly of NGO activity.

When Tony Blair received the Global Legacy Award last week from Save the Children, an organization dedicated to "transforming children's lives," it seemed like a bad joke to many people. This, after all, was a man who had been willing to use fabricated evidence to launch an illegal war against Iraq during his time as Britain's Prime Minister, a conflict that irrevocably "transformed" the lives of thousands of children by killing them.

These days Blair is advising the new military regime in Egypt and doing a sideline in Saudi oil kickbacks. We don't hear too much about children in either of those countries, but I'm willing to bet that living under military or aristocratic dictatorship isn't too good for the little mites, especially when, as is the case with Saudi Arabia, child marriage is nothing unusual.

Considering this track record, I would think that anyone who has simply refrained from hurting children would be more qualified to receive an award from a charity dedicated to their protection than Tony Blair.

So how did "Teflon Tony" not only get away with murder, but actually get rewarded for it? Did the good folks at Save the Children simply suffer a regrettable overdose of saintliness, deciding to sweep Blair's past transgressions under the rug, and judge him not lest they themselves be judged? It sounds like the kind of misguided, goodness-orgy that an organization dedicated to helping children might be susceptible to. But if your idea of charity is still stuck in the age of rending thy cloak in half to clothe the naked, and dividing thy bread to feed the hungry, think again.

These days "helping" the needy is big business. Much has (rightly) been made of Save the Children's direct connections to Blair: UK Chief Executive Justin Forsyth worked for Tony Blair back when he was Prime Minister, as did Fergus Drake, the charity's UK Director of Programmes. But these two hardly make up the entire decision-making apparatus of the global behemoth that is Save the Children. How did such a disastrous decision slide through the ranks? A quick scan of the current and former occupations of Save the Children's trustees and top staff shows why the idea of rewarding the former PM slipped down their gullet so effortlessly: Barclays Bank, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Xerox, Yahoo, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, American Express, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, Coca-Cola, IKEA...the list goes on.

Are the US, NATO and Russia on a mad spiral leading to war in Europe? Is it inevitable? Far from it.

The US-propelled vassal Petro Poroshenko, currently starring in the oligarch dance in Ukraine this week advanced the proposition that Ukrainians in the near future, after his "reforms", will be asked to vote on whether to join NATO.

Let's be serious here. Some of you may be familiar with the concept of "shatter belt" - territories and peoples that historically have been squeezed between the Germanic Eagle and the Russian Bear.

As we stand, the whole shatter belt - apart from Ukraine and Belarus - has become NATO members. Were Ukraine to become a NATO member in - albeit remote - future, the shatter belt buffer zone would disappear. This means NATO - essentially the US - planted right on Russia's western border.

Washington has just announced that it will be pre-positioning more military vehicles in Europe, to be used in exercises or "potential military operations." This is perfectly in tune with the relentless US "think tank-land" spin that NATO and the US will be "forced" to balance their commitment to security in Eastern Europe against potential Russian "aggression."

As Ukraine, the Baltic States and Poland persist in compounded hysteria about such "aggression," the option of a post-MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) US-Russia nuclear war is now - casually - back on the discussion table. At least there's a countercurrent; strands of informed Americans are wondering why the US should be paying for Europe's defense when European GDP is larger than the US's.