Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk declared his country's intention to join NATO a few days ago, officially flip-flopping from his stance expressed nearly half a year ago. He said that the government was submitting a bill to the Rada to officially change Ukraine's non-aligned status and also de-facto prohibit it from ever joining the Eurasian Union. It is unclear how he plans to pass the bill, considering that the Rada had been unilaterally dissolved earlier this month. Nonetheless, with Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk being the only politicians to still have power after this recent de-facto political purge, it is more than likely that they will make sure their military ambitions are 'legitimized' by hook or by crook, thereby pulling Shadow NATO out of the closet into the limelight.

Military Failures and False Flag Invasions

The timing of Kiev's not-so-unexpected decision to officially announce its intent to join NATO is strongly influenced by its recent string of military failures against the Novorossiya Armed Forces (NAF). This reality is completely opposite to the victory hype that was being prematurely pushed earlier this month. At that time, Kiev was all but claiming victory against the pro-Federalists, completely dismissing any talks of a ceasefire and proclaiming its march on besieged Donetsk and Lugansk. Today, however, NAF is waging a successful counteroffensive against Kiev, has reached the Sea of Azov, and even encircled thousands of Ukrainian troops. So successful has this counteroffensive been that President Putin lauded the NAF and encouraged them to show mercy by opening up a humanitarian corridor to allow Kiev's forces to safely (and without their arms) retreat into Russia. Such are the fortunes of war, and Kiev is likely kicking itself for not having accepted the ceasefire earlier this month.

Many commentators consider what the Fed has done to be akin to providing stimulus, morphine, juice to an ailing economy.

We believe Fed's actions would be more appropriately described as permitted cancerous beliefs to spread throughout the financial system, thereby killing Democratic Capitalism which is the basis of the capital markets.

Today we're going to explain what the "final outcome" for this process will be. The short version is what happens to a cancer patient who allows the disease to spread unchecked (death). In the case of the Fed's actions we will see a similar "death" of Democratic Capitalism and the subsequent death of the capital markets. We are, of course, talking in metaphors here: the world will not end, and commerce and business will continue, but the form of capital markets and Capitalism we are experiencing today will cease to exist as the Fed's policies result in the market and economy eventually collapsing in such a fashion that what follows will bear little resemblance to that which we are experiencing now.The focus of this "death" will not be stocks, but bonds, particularly sovereign bonds: the asset class against which all monetary policy and investment theory has been based for the last 80+ years.

Indeed, basic financial theory has proposed that sovereign bonds are essentially the only true "risk-free" investment in the world. While history shows this theory to be false (sovereign defaults have occurred throughout the 20^th century) this has been the basic tenant for all investment models and indeed the financial system at large going back for 80 some odd years.

The reason for this is that the Treasury (US sovereign bond) market is the basis of the entire monetary system in the US and the Global financial system in general. Indeed, US Treasuries are the senior most assets on the Primary Dealers' (world's largest banks) balance sheets. To understand why this is as well as why the Fed's policies will ultimately destroy this system, you first need to understand the Primary Dealer system that is the basis for the US banking system at large.

A zipping comes across the sky.

A man named Neil Parfitt is standing in a field on a cattle ranch outside Warwick, Australia. A white vehicle appears above the trees, a tiny plane a bit bigger than a seagull. It glides towards Parfitt, pitches upwards to a vertical position, and hovers near him, a couple hundred feet in the air. From its belly, a package comes tumbling downward, connected by a thin line to the vehicle itself. Right before the delivery hits the ground, it slows, hitting the earth with a tap. The delivery slows, almost imperceptibly, just before it hits the ground, hardly kicking up any dust. A small rectangular module on the end of the line detaches the payload, and ascends back up the vehicle, locking into place beneath the nose. As the wing returns to flying posture and zips back to its launch point half a mile away, Parfitt walks over to the package, opens it up, and extracts some treats for his dogs.

The Australian test flight and 30 others like it conducted in mid-August are the culmination of the first phase of Project Wing, a secret drone program that's been running for two years at Google X, the company's whoa-inducing, long-range research lab.

Though a couple of rumors have escaped the Googleplex - because of course Google must have a drone-delivery program - Project Wing's official existence and substance were revealed today. I've spent the past week talking to Googlers who worked on the project, reviewing video of the flights, and interviewing other people convinced delivery by drone will work.

Taken with the company's other robotics investments, Google's corporate posture has become even more ambitious. Google doesn't just want to organize all the world's information. Google wants to organize all the world.

US President Barack Obama is trying to divert attention on his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to cover his poor leadership and his actions across the world, a political commentator says.

You can hear the 3:30 minute Skype interview at Press TV here.

© Unknown

"Nobody accepts any responsibility for terrible mistakes that they make. It's always someone else's fault," Veterans Today editor Jim Dean told Press TV on Saturday.

He made the remarks when asked about the recent announcement by the White House that Obama's next week trip to Europe is a warning to Putin against "messing around" with the Baltic States.

President Obama will travel to Tallinn on Tuesday to meet with the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The visit comes amid escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine.

"Part of the message that the president will be sending is, we stand with you," Charles Kupchan, the administration's senior director for European Affairs, said on Friday.

"Article Five constitutes an ironclad guarantee of your security. Russia, don't even think about messing around in Estonia or in any of the Baltic areas in the same way that you have been messing around in Ukraine," he warned.

Dean also noted that the United States is "very angry that Russia has played their cards so smooth" in Ukraine and that Washington is "messing around" in that region of the world, not Moscow.

In the wake of World War I, erstwhile propagandist and political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined propaganda as "the management of collective attitudes" and the "control over opinion" through "the manipulation of significant symbols."[1] The extent to which this tradition is enthusiastically upheld in the West and the United States in particular is remarkable.

The American public is consistently propagandized by its government and corporate news media on the most vital of contemporary issues and events.

Deception on such a scale would be of little consequence if the US were not the most powerful economic and military force on earth.

© Tim Anderson

A case in point is the hysteria Western news media are attempting to create concerning the threat posed by the mercenary-terrorist army now being promoted as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or "ISIS."

As was the case with the US intelligence asset and bogey publicized as "Al Qaeda," and Al Qaeda's Syrian adjunct, "Al Nusra," such entities are - apparently by design - inadequately investigated and defined by major news media. Absent meaningful historical context they usefully serve as another raison d'ểtre for America's terminal "War on Terror."

A seemingly obvious feature of such terrorist forces left unexamined by corporate media is that they are observably comprised of the same or comparable personnel unleashed elsewhere throughout the Middle East as part of a strategy proposed during the George W. Bush administration in 2007.[2]

With the above observations in mind, ISIS is well-financed, militarily proficient, and equipped with modern vehicles and weaponry. It also exhibits an uncanny degree of media savvy in terms of propagating its message in professional-looking videos and on platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. "Western intelligence services," the New York Times reports, claim to be "worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones, and multilingual Twitter messages."[3]

Along these lines, ISIS even received a largely sympathetic portrayal in a five-part series produced and aired by the Rupert Murdoch-backed Vice News.[4] Indeed, Vice News' "The Spread of the Caliphate" is reminiscent of the public relations-style reportage produced via the "embedding" of corporate news media personnel with US and allied forces during the 2003 conquest of Iraq.

Innocent people's lives are being ruined. Why isn't anyone watching the watchlist?

The US government's web of surveillance is vast and interconnected. Now we know just how opaque, inefficient and discriminatory it can be.

As we were reminded again just this week, you can be pulled into the National Security Agency's database quietly and quickly, and the consequences can be long and enduring. Through ICREACH, a Google-style search engine created for the intelligence community, the NSA provides data on private communications to 23 government agencies. More than 1,000 analysts had access to that information.

This kind of data sharing, however, isn't limited to the latest from Edward Snowden's NSA files. It was confirmed earlier this month that the FBI shares its master watchlist, the Terrorist Screening Database, with at least 22 foreign governments, countless federal agencies, state and local law enforcement, plus private contractors.

The watchlist tracks "known" and "suspected" terrorists and includes both foreigners and Americans. It's also based on loose standards and secret evidence, which ensnares innocent people. Indeed, the standards are so low that the US government's guidelines specifically allow for a single, uncorroborated source of information - including a Facebook or Twitter post - to serve as the basis for placing you on its master watchlist.

Of the 680,000 individuals on that FBI master list, roughly 40% have "no recognized terrorist group affiliation", according to the Intercept. These individuals don't even have a connection - as the government loosely defines it - to a designated terrorist group, but they are still branded as suspected terrorists.

"Their exact location is unknown for top secrecy reasons," a spokesman for the Donetsk militia said on Monday

A group of five or six NATO officers has been blocked in the town of Mariupol in the Donetsk region, a spokesman for the Donetsk militia said on Monday.

"Their exact location is unknown for top secrecy reasons. But they obviously cannot leave Mariupol as all junta commanders and special units have already left the city," the spokesman said.

ITAR-TASS has not confirmed this report from other sources yet.

Losses of Ukrainian army near Mariupol

The militia staff reports that units of Novorossiya's army have shot down a Ukrainian Su-25 jet and two Mi-8 helicopters on the outskirts of Mariupol. According to the Donetsk People's Republic, about 100 Ukrainian servicemen were wounded or killed.

In the fight, militiamen managed to capture two tanks, about six multiple rocket launcher systems, two armed personnel carriers, up to 14 guns and mortars, up to 24 automotive vehicles and two ammunition depots.

The United States sees Israel's announcement on Sunday of a land appropriation for possible settlement construction in the occupied West Bank as "counterproductive" to peace efforts and urges the Israeli government to reverse the decision, Reuters reported a State Department official as saying.

Israel laid claim to nearly a thousand acres (400 hectares) in the Etzion settlement bloc near Bethlehem, a move which an anti-settlement group termed the biggest appropriation in 30 years and a Palestinian official said would cause only more friction after the Gaza war.

"We have long made clear our opposition to continued settlement activity," the U.S. official said. "This announcement, like every other settlement announcement Israel makes, planning step they approve and construction tender they issue is counterproductive to Israel's stated goal of a negotiated two-state solution with the Palestinians."

"We urge the government of Israel to reverse this decision," the official said in Washington.


Israel announced plans on Sunday to expropriate 400 hectares (988 acres) of Palestinian land in the Bethlehem area in the south of the occupied West Bank, the military said, Agence France-Presse reported.

"On the instructions of the political echelon... 4,000 dunams at (the settlement of) Gevaot is declared as state land," the army said, adding that concerned parties have 45 days to appeal.


It said that the step stemmed from political decisions taken after the June killing of three Israeli teenagers snatched from a roadside in the same area, known to Israelis as Gush Etzion settlement bloc.


Israel has named three Palestinians from the southern West Bank city of Hebron as being behind the murders.

The Etzion settlements council welcomed Sunday's announcement and said it was the prelude to expansion of the current Gevaot settlement.

It "paves the way for the new city of Gevaot", a statement said.

Settlements watchdog Peace Now expressed alarm.

"As far as we know, this declaration is unprecedented in its scope since the 1980s and can dramatically change the reality in the Gush Etzion and the Bethlehem areas," it said.

Vladimir Putin today dramatically raised the stakes in the Ukraine conflict by calling for the first time for statehood to be considered for the restive east of the former Soviet state.

"We need to immediately begin substantive talks... on questions of the political organisation of society and statehood for southeastern Ukraine with the goal of protecting the lawful interests of the people who live there," Putin was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies on a TV show broadcast in the far east of the country.

Russia has previously only called for greater rights under a decentralised federal system to be accorded to the eastern regions of Ukraine, where predominantly Russian-speakers live.


In the programme, taped on Friday, Putin did not directly address additional Western sanctions on Russia.

Putin however blamed the crisis in Ukraine on the West, accusing it of supporting a "coup" against pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych in February.

"They should have known that Russia cannot stand aside when people are being shot almost at point-blank," said Putin, adding that he did not have in mind "the Russian state but the Russian people."

Putin has denied that Moscow has sent regular troops to fight in Ukraine, but pro-Russian rebels have said that many Russian soldiers have volunteered while "on vacation".

Via Agence France-Presse

EU sanctions against Russia are unfair and unproductive, according to Thierry Mariani, member of the National Assembly of France.

"I, and many of the other participants of today's meeting, think that the sanctions imposed against Russia are unfair, unconstructive and unproductive," Mariani said during a meeting between Sergei Naryshkin, Russia's State Duma (lower house of parliament) Speaker, with French political and social activists in Paris Monday.

Over the past few months, the United States and the European Union introduced several rounds of targeted sanctions against the Russian economy, unjustifiably blaming Moscow for meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs.