Israel has reacted with fury to the "reconciliation" deal agreed on last week between the rival Palestinian bourgeois parties, Fatah and the Muslim Brotherhood Hamas.

Speaking on Sunday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a halt to the so-called peace talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas unless he "tears up" the pact with Hamas.

Fatah and Hamas had agreed to form an interim unity government in the next five weeks and to fix a date for elections later this year.

The deal was negotiated by Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of Hamas's politburo, and Azzam al-Ahmad, a Fatah central committee member, following informal talks in Cairo between Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) delegates and Marzouk. Discussions were also held in Qatar, a major sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, and with European officials.

America's biggest bank discovered a $4 billion accounting error on Monday, and is suspending its share buyback program and planned quarterly dividend. The mistake went unnoticed for several years and brings into question how 'healthy' Bank of America is.

After reporting the miscalculation to the Federal Reserve, Bank of America will also have to re-do its stress tests, to ensure it isn't "too big" and has sufficient capital reserves, the New York Times reports.

Stocks have fallen 6.27 percent on the news, the most since November 2012. Shares tumbled to $14.95 by market close in New York on Monday, erasing all of the 2014 gains.

The error was sourced to Merrill Lynch, where lower-level employees botched the numbers they submit to the financial authorities for a quarterly securities filing. The gaffe also went undiscovered by the bank's board of directors as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers, its external auditor. The US Federal Reserve also missed the blunder.

The Russian Foreign Ministry responded with a scathing statement to the EU's new round of sanctions against Russia, saying Europe apparently has no insight into the political situation in Ukraine.

"Instead of forcing the Kiev clique to sit down with south-eastern Ukraine to negotiate the country's future political system, our partners are toeing Washington's line to take more unfriendly gestures towards Russia," the statement declared.

"If somebody in Brussels hopes to stabilize the situation in Ukraine by this, it is evidence of a total lack of understanding of the internal political situation in that country and invites local neo-Nazis to continue their lawlessness and thuggery towards the peaceful civilians of the south-east," the statement said. "Are you not ashamed?"

Israeli bulldozers have demolished a mosque and several homes in a Palestinian village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, leaving up to 30 people homeless on the deadline of the peace talks between Palestine and Israel.

Eighteen Israeli military jeeps and two bulldozers stormed the village of Kherbt al-Taweel near Nablus, to the north of the West Bank early on Tuesday morning and declared the village a closed military zone, Ghassan Douglas, the Palestinian Authority official in charge of monitoring settlement activity in the northern West Bank, told the Anadolu Agency (AA).

He added that before demolishing the buildings "the forces prevented residents from entering or leaving the village and students from going to their school."

"I went to make my dawn prayers at the mosque and found the army surrounding it," resident Abdel Fattah Maarouf, 63, told Reuters, "Then they tore it down. They want this area so they can build settlements on it."

A couple of weeks ago, Princeton and Northwestern released a very important study that proved statistically what many of us already knew about the American political process. It is nothing more than an oligarchy.

It's one thing to read an academic study showing how cancerous the political system is, it's quite another to hear a description of how things work from one of the biggest crony weapons of mass societal destruction himself, Mr. Larry Summers.

A recent review in the New York Times of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's new memoir A Fighting Chance recalls a stunningly despicable quote by Summers.

In the spring of 2009, when the banker handout, I mean bailout, was a heated topic of discussion, Elizabeth Warren attended a dinner with Mr. Summers who at the time was the director of the National Economic Council and a top economic adviser to President Obama. This is what transpired:

After dinner, "Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice," Ms. Warren writes. "I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People - powerful people - listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders.

What is so incredible about the quote above is that it essentially proves correct everything I and many others have been saying about how "things work" in America these days.

I don't like authoritarians. I think they're unwell. I also think that the outcomes, for most people, of a predominantly authoritarian society are extremely poor. So, it was with despair and alarm that I read the analysis contained in this link: Neoliberalism's War on Democracy

The article, which I believe is, in fact, the introduction abstracted from a whole book on the matter, makes its points with such accuracy, lucidity, truth and honesty, that I found it excessively difficult to read on.

The article's thesis is that we are being deluged by lawmakers and corporations that are leading us toward an undemocratic, authoritarian life. We increasingly, as a society, prey upon the weak and the vulnerable. We blame the victims. We consign whole sectors of society to disposability, based on their ethnicity, immigration status, skin colour, age or economic misfortune. There are some elites calling the shots, who have bought and paid for the entire project to hoover up the world's wealth and call it their own, while saying screw the rest of us. We are increasingly dancing to the tune of the corporate-military-industrial-national security complex. We've succumbed to a brutal, cruel, uncaring, selfish, merciless regime of governance.

Now, this is not a new phenomenon. Adolf Hitler's project had the same hallmarks. So did Napoleon's and Alexander the Great, not to mention the Mongol hordes, the Plantagenet dynasty, the Crusades and any number of empire building projects of previous centuries. In each case, the weak and the vulnerable, the innocent and peaceful, were crushed under the wheels of a conquering machine, in the name of selfish enrichment and the accumulation of power and wealth.

What nobody has ever done, to my knowledge, is analysed whether or not all of this was sane and hence, whether the present course of events is sane either.

The following is the introduction to Henry Geroux's new book Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Read it now by ordering it from Truthout.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
- James Baldwin

Four decades of neoliberal policies have resulted in an economic Darwinism that promotes privatization, commodification, free trade, and deregulation. It privileges personal responsibility over larger social forces, reinforces the gap between the rich and poor by redistributing wealth to the most powerful and wealthy individuals and groups, and it fosters a mode of public pedagogy that privileges the entrepreneurial subject while encouraging a value system that promotes self-interest, if not an unchecked selfishness.[1] Since the 1970s, neoliberalism or free-market fundamentalism has become not only a much-vaunted ideology that now shapes all aspects of life in the United States but also a predatory global phenomenon "that drives the practices and principles of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and World Trade Organization, trans-national institutions which largely determine the economic policies of developing countries and the rules of international trade."[2]

With its theater of cruelty and mode of public pedagogy, neoliberalism as a form of economic Darwinism attempts to undermine all forms of solidarity capable of challenging market-driven values and social relations, promoting the virtues of an unbridled individualism almost pathological in its disdain for community, social responsibility, public values, and the public good. As the welfare state is dismantled and spending is cut to the point where government becomes unrecognizable - except to promote policies that benefit the rich, corporations, and the defense industry - the already weakened federal and state governments are increasingly replaced by what João Biehl has called proliferating "zones of social abandonment" and "terminal exclusion."[3]

Exclusive: Any propaganda war starts by planting stories that your target is getting rich, whether he is or isn't, the latest move in demonizing Vladimir Putin. But the larger question is what might happen if the neocons succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia, asks Robert Parry.

Now that the demonization of Russia's President Vladimir Putin is in full swing, one has to wonder when the neocons will unveil their plan for "regime change" in Moscow, despite the risks that overthrowing Putin and turning Russia into a super-sized version of Ukraine might entail for the survival of the planet.

There is a "little-old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly" quality to neocon thinking. When one of their schemes goes bad, they simply move to a bigger, more dangerous scheme.

If the Palestinians and Lebanon's Hezbollah persist in annoying you and troubling Israel, you target their sponsors with "regime change" - in Iraq, Syria and Iran. If your "regime change" in Iraq goes badly, you escalate the subversion of Syria and the bankrupting of Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War."]

The United States expanded its sanctions against Russia on Monday, targeting members of President Vladimir Putin's "inner circle" and technology that could be useful to Russia's military.

President Barack Obama said the "targeted" sanctions are in response to Russia's actions in Ukraine.

"The United States has taken further action today in response to Russia's continued illegal intervention in Ukraine and provocative acts that undermine Ukraine's democracy and threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity," the White House said in a statement. Since a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 17, Russia "has done nothing" to meet its commitments "and in fact has further escalated the crisis," the White House said in a statement.

"The Department of the Treasury is imposing sanctions on seven Russian government officials, including two members of President Putin's inner circle, who will be subject to an asset freeze and a U.S. visa ban, and 17 companies linked to Putin's inner circle, which will be subject to an asset freeze.

The Barack Obama administration seems to love the sound of unilateral sanctions in the morning. It must feel like "victory".

Real, hardcore sanctions, if ever applied, would be devastating mostly for North Atlantic Treaty Organization poodles, not Moscow. Meanwhile, (energy) adults continue to do business as usual.

There's no way to understand Cold War 2.0 without a flashback to November 2010, when Vladimir Putin directly addressed Germanbusiness/industry, proposing an economic community from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

German interest in this key strategic relationship has been reciprocal. Amplified to other nations, that implies in the long run a full European Union-Russia economic/trade integration, and, in the bigger picture, a step closer to Europe-Asia integration. Which translates as absolute anathema for the embattled, Monopoly-addicted hyperpower/hegemon.

For all of US Think Tankland talking and theorizing, breathlessly, about "containment" of a "rogue state" - which in itself is laughable, as if Russia was Somalia - the Obama administration's overarching "strategy" is really in a class by itself. This masterpiece of juvenile delinquent diplomacy boils down to "ignore Putin".

Call it the "I don't like you; I don't wanna talk to you; I just wish you'd die" school of diplomacy. How come Talleyrand never thought if it? Well, with advisers such as the astonishing mediocrity Ivo Daalder, a former ambassador to NATO, no wonder Obama does not need enemies.