Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, went against the Obama administration's own line when he said Thursday that the Israeli military acted "responsibly" and went to "extraordinary lengths" to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties during Operation Protective Edge last summer.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki confirmed Friday during a daily press briefing in Washington that the administration still believes "Israel could have done more to prevent civilian casualties" during the offensive on the Gaza Strip.

She made the remarks in direct response to a question that referenced both the general's declaration and the State Department's condemnation of Israel's Aug. 3 shelling of a United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency school in Rafah. Psaki issued a statement after that attack, saying that the US was "appalled." She described it as "disgraceful."

"The coordinates of the school, like all UN facilities in Gaza, have been repeatedly communicated to the Israeli Defense Forces," she said. "The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians. We call for a full and prompt investigation of this incident as well as the recent shelling of other UNRWA schools."

Dempsey made the remarks at a Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs conference in New York. He praised widely-criticized tactics, claiming that Israel's dropping of leaflets and its "roof-knocking" sufficiently warned civilians of impending attacks.

"They did some extraordinary things to try to limit civilian casualties, to include calling out, making it known that they were going to destroy a particular structure," Dempsey said.

"It's an incredibly difficult environment, but I can say to you with confidence that I think that they acted responsibly," he added.

Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a psychopath? These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them through manipulative means.

Last year, the Occupy Movement drew a distinction between the top 1% and the remaining 99% - as distinguished by measures of wealth and income. Of course, this breakdown is misleading since there are many top income earners who sympathize with the plights of others and are not part of the problem. Now the real defining metric reveals itself: 1% of the global population is comprised of people who exhibit psychopathic tendencies.

The global economy we have today is built on a deep history of top-down hierarchies that promote domination and control. There have been plenty of feudal lords, warrior chieftains, and violent dictators throughout the last 6000 years of burgeoning civilization. The modern era saw the ascension of "corporate personhood" as an amoral entity enshrined into law by an 1886 ruling of the US Supreme Court. This provided a new mechanism for mobilizing capital by the moneyed elites to deploy their wealth into the realm of public policy and civil society - creating the dysfunctional economic system we must now contend with as we struggle to address global challenges. We find ourselves in a situation where economic philosophies that celebrate selfishness can be implemented through a web of legal and financial tools that elevate and reward those individuals with psychological tendencies toward self-interest - the same people who also have a predisposition to game social contexts to their advantage regardless of impacts on others. Thus the psychopathic corporation was forged as a Frankenstein monster that enabled the constant flow of psychopathic blood, continuously replenished by the 1% of the population born into psychopathy in each new generation, to rise into positions of power as stock traders, corporate executives, and corruptible politicians.

The high and mighty George Soros recently published an article about the Ukraine crisis in the New York Review of Books. It is so full of lies, manipulations, and false assumptions that reading it makes your head spin. However, given George Soros' prominent position in Western strategic circles, his article's publication presents a rare opportunity for those of us in the 'reality-based community' to see what the enemy is up to, and what it might do next. And so we've taken some time to 'truth-ify' Soros' anti-Russian screed by picking apart his steaming pile of propaganda.

Let's start with the title:

'Wake Up, Europe'

Soros better hope European politicians and people don't wake up to what's going on or it'll be game over for Washington and the Western global 'elite'.

Europe is facing a challenge from Russia to its very existence.

What??? How can Russia challenge the 'very existence' of a continent, a continent of which it is a part? What in God's name can he mean by this?

Neither the European leaders nor their citizens are fully aware of this challenge or know how best to deal with it. I attribute this mainly to the fact that the European Union in general and the eurozone in particular lost their way after the financial crisis of 2008.

Yeah, thanks in large part to greedy financial terrorists like George Soros.

The fiscal rules that currently prevail in Europe have aroused a lot of popular resentment. Anti-Europe parties captured nearly 30 percent of the seats in the latest elections for the European Parliament but they had no realistic alternative to the EU to point to until recently.

Okay, we guess by "Europe," then, he means the European Union, not the continent. Firstly, the EU, in its current form, is essentially a US-controlled organization. Its economic and fiscal policies are based on the 'Washington Consensus'; its foreign policy and military adventures are based on 'American exceptionalism'; its military-intelligence structures were created by - or taken over by - NATO, MI6 and the CIA. So if one is to criticize 'the EU', as it is, then one is criticizing Washington.

Secondly, the sharp rise in popularity for anti-EU parties across Europe is a reaction to said ideological subservience to the US, not an expression of 'anti-Europeanism' per se. It's natural and logical that Europe as a region would come together and tend towards ever closer integration. What is foreign and unnatural is that that integration would lead to such undemocratic monstrosities as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a US 'CorpGov' project to cement their 'Atlantic Empire'.

We say 'undemocratic' because it in no way reflects the will of the people, who have not once been consulted about whether or not they'd like to live under such a regime. In fact, the EU simply stopped consulting the people when referenda held in France and the Netherlands in 2005 on the proposed EU Constitution returned strong rejections. The EU that Europeans can't stand is the EU that people like Soros were instrumental in shaping.

This is the man whose 'Quantum' hedge fund made $5.5 billion last year, the highest ever, while the vast majority of people in Europe (and the US) have to tighten their belts because speculators like George bloody Soros keep gambling with other people's money.

Last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, said at the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall last weekend that we are facing a new Cold War. What are the geopolitical realities behind this statement?

This weekend I was invited onto RT to do an interview about the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, particularly focusing on the speech delivered by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, during his visit to Berlin.

I would like to expand on some of the topics I mentioned - how to encapsulate an alternative geopolitical perspective different from the Western orthodoxy in under four minutes? A task even Monty Python would find challenging!

The first issue was Gorbachev's comments about a new Cold War. I would agree, and this is being fabricated by the USA, as that country always needs an Emmanuel Goldstein figure to justify its military-industrial complex that is bankrupting the country and brutalizing the world, while enriching the US oligarchs to the detriment of civil society everywhere.

The first front line in this new Cold War is the internet. In the 1990s the USA had a golden opportunity - in fact a perfect storm of opportunities. It was the last superpower left standing in a newly unipolar world, history had officially ended and capitalism had triumphed. The Soviet Union had disintegrated and the newly shorn Russia was tottering, its vast national wealth being assiduously asset-stripped by the globalised neocon elite.

Plus, the new world wide web was exponentially growing and the key pioneers were predominantly American companies. After an initially panicked phase of playing catch-up in the 1990s, western spy agencies saw the potential for total mastery of the internet, creating a surveillance panopticon that the KGB or the Stasi could only have fantasized about. With thanks to Edward Snowden, we are now beginning to get glimpses of the full horror of the surveillance under which we all now live.

China is sending Obama and the empire of chaos a powerful message at the APEC gathering in Beijing. First of all, it is clear that Putin is the guest of honor and not Obama. This was strongly demonstrated in the usual group photo of the leaders, where Putin was to the right of the Chinese president Xi. In contrast Obama was hardly visible and relegated on the outer wing, with female leaders. This photo says it all with the added circles by a blogger:
The message is clear. China and Russia stand shoulder to shoulder as big strategic partners and are intent on asserting their vision of a multipolar world which is not dominated by the petrodollar.

APEC did agree on a free trade deal, but it was the Chinese version, not Obama's, that won the day:

Newly revealed emails show Attorney General Eric Holder trying and failing to contain his temper over the botched Fast and Furious probe, at one point saying "some people can kiss my a - '' if they think he was too hard on a U.S. Attorney pushed out over the scandal.

The emails were among 64,000 documents turned over by the Justice Department this week to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has spent years investigating Fast and Furious, a gun-tracking operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The botched operation allowed guns to be taken to Mexico, apparently in the misguided belief that doing so would help them catch gun-runners for the drug cartels.

The recent elections in Ukraine have created a very difficult political situation.

Political representation in the Rada is everything that foreign actors have been dreaming of since the onset of destabilization of Ukraine in February.

The goal of filling the parliament with politicians who harbor radical ideas, and above all a strong anti-Russian sentiment has been achieved.

Essentially, these political groups are, directly or indirectly, related to the most extreme factions of nationalist Ukrainians such as the National Guard.

The information that has filtered out in recent months has made it possible to certify that these private battalions are financed by oligarchs close to foreign actors, especially in the US.

The Cold War has never ended from the US side as their goal has always been to crack Russia, geopolitical analyst and author, F. William Engdahl, told RT, adding that the American anti-missile shield in Europe brings the world close to nuclear holocaust.

RT: Mikhail Gorbachev is celebrated in the West for his role in ending the Cold War. But will the West listen to him now, when he speaks out against Washington's recent actions?

William Engdahl: I don't think Washington will ever listen to him. They went back on their pledge not to expand NATO to the East after we saw it agreed by James Baker III, the Secretary of the State, and the negotiations for the peaceful transfer of East Germany back to Germany as a whole. The rematch by Gorbachev today: he has been conspicuously silent for the last 25 years since he was forced to leave office in Moscow. And I have always had the hunch that he was a genuine Russian patriot and he just had no occasion to speak out because he was vilified inside Russia. In fact he was a victim of what we now see as evidence that clearly indicates there was a CIA coup d'état backing Boris Yeltsin to be the man of Washington so as to be simply dismantle the Russian economy entirely after 1990.

RT: Gorbachev's warning of a new Cold War is alarming. Is there any reason to believe Washington will heed the warnings and scale back its foreign policy ambitions?

WE: I would certainly hope so. The behavior of the European Union, particularly of the Merkel government since the coup d'état in Kiev - and it was nothing less than a coup d'état by the US State Department and the CIA - back on February 21, the policy stance of the German government has been one of the vassal state bending its knees to Washington on every critical issue of pressure. I would hope that they will get a little bit of backbone in Berlin and in other countries in the EU and take a European way rather than dutifully following every diktat from Washington, as they have been doing.

The biggest threat to Canada's national security is internal. It is the offshoot of an extraordinarily successful - because it remains largely undetected - coup that imposed itself on the country with the federal election of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) in 2006, and solidified its impacts with the election of a Conservative majority in 2011.

Author, poet, academic, and former Canadian diplomat Prof. Peter Dale Scott recently disclosed a wikileaks cable indicating that the International Republican Institute (IRI), an off-shoot of the CIA, and a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) helped install Stephen Harper as Canada's Prime Minister. This was the coup.

Former US President George W. Bush still believes the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the right thing to do and has no regrets, except that a "violent group of people have risen up again," he said in an interview with CBS News referring to ISIS.

The former president was talking to CBS' correspondent Bob Schieffer about his new book - a biography of his father President George H. W. Bush - in which among other things he describes his own decision to send troops to Iraq in 2003.

When asked if he ever feels that sending in troops "was the wrong decision," Bush answers: "No, I think it was the right decision."


He does however admit the job could have been done better, as he regrets the eventual rise of Islamic State, which he refers to as "al-Qaeda plus."

"My regret is that a violent group of people has risen up again. This is al-Qaeda plus," he said. "I put in the book that they need to be defeated. And I hope we do [defeat them]."

Bush also said he was surprised when he was told by one of the FBI agents who interrogated Saddam Hussein after his capture that the deposed Iraqi leader did not believe the US would actually invade.

A Portrait of my Father is due to hit book shelves next week, and amongst other things it examines the first Gulf War in 1991 and George Bush senior's failures in politics including his crushing defeat to Bill Clinton in 1992.