Only days after American Vice President Joe Biden made a very public and tantalizing offer of bilateral talks between the US and Iran, there then follows another round of punitive trade sanctions imposed by Washington on Iran's vital oil industry.

What to make of this seemingly contradictory US position? Some commentators say that the above anomalous attitude reflects a carrot-and-stick policy in Washington, by which incentives dangled in front of Iran are quickly followed by a blow of hardship, with the objective of forcing an end result.

The supposed end result in this case is that the Americans and their Western allies want Iran to demonstrate definitively to the rest of the world that it will never develop capability for nuclear weapons. This demonstration would be achieved, according to Washington, if Iran were to somehow give a cast-iron guarantee that it has circumscribed its nuclear technology and the crucial uranium-enrichment process.

So, this argument goes, if Iran were to comply with this desired objective by severely limiting its nuclear research and industry, then certain "carrots" will follow: a lifting of the crippling economic sanctions and a normalization of diplomatic relations.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has rejected any talks with the United States under pressure and threats.

"I am not a diplomat. I am a revolutionary and speak frankly, honestly, and firmly. An offer of talks makes sense only when the side [that makes the offer] shows its goodwill," Ayatollah Khamenei said in a meeting with the officials and commanders of Iran Navy on Thursday.

"Negotiation is meaningful when the two sides talk with goodwill, under equal conditions and without seeking to deceive each other. Therefore, 'negotiation for the sake of negotiation', 'tactical negotiation' and negotiation offer in order to sell a superpower's gesture to the world is a deceptive move," the Leader stated.

Ayatollah Khamenei also noted that during the past four years, nothing has been seen from the United States but continuation of conspiracies, abetting seditionists and supporting the terrorists which assassinated Iranian nation's scientists.

"You (the Americans) point the gun at Iran and say either negotiations or we pull the trigger! You should know that pressure and negotiations do not go together, and the [Iranian] nation will not be intimidated by such things."

"...........Their defeat

Doth by their own insinuation grow.

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes

Between the pass and fell incensèd points

Of mighty opposites."

- Hamlet on the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

At the height of the 2012 election campaign in late October, a U.S. delegation tiptoed into Japan and then China with scant media coverage. It was "unofficial," but Hillary Clinton gave it her blessing. And it was headed by two figures high in the imperial firmament, Richard L. Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State for George W. Bush; and Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former Pentagon and intelligence official in the Clinton administration and Dean Emeritus of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The delegation also included James B. Steinberg, who served as the Deputy Secretary of State in the Obama administration and Stephen J. Hadley, Bush Two's national security adviser.

The delegation was billed as an attempt by the U.S. to defuse tensions between Japan and China over a number of small islands both claim. But was it? What is the outlook of these influential figures? Interestingly, Armitage and Nye provide us with a partial answer in a brief paper published the preceding August by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS), entitled "The Japan-U.S. Alliance. Anchoring Stability in Asia," the carefully crafted fruit of a CSIS Study Group they chaired. The strategy proposed therein, as outlined below, should be very distressing to the Chinese - as well as to the Japanese and Americans.

After stonewalling for more than a year federal judges and ordinary citizens who sought the revelation of its secret legal research justifying the presidential use of drones to kill persons overseas - even Americans - claiming the research was so sensitive and so secret that it could not be revealed without serious consequences, the government sent a summary of its legal memos to an NBC newsroom earlier this week.

This revelation will come as a great surprise, and not a little annoyance, to U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon, who heard many hours of oral argument during which the government predicted gloom and doom if its legal research were subjected to public scrutiny. She very reluctantly agreed with the feds, but told them she felt caught in "a veritable Catch-22," because the feds have created "a thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret."

She was writing about President Obama killing Americans and refusing to divulge the legal basis for claiming the right to do so. Now we know that basis.

The French-led military offensive in its former colony of Mali has pushed back radical Islamists and allied militias from some of the country's northern cities, freeing the local population from repressive Taliban-style totalitarian rule. The United States has backed the French military effort by transporting French troops and equipment and providing reconnaissance through its satellites and drones. However, despite these initial victories, it raises concerns as to what unforeseen consequences may lay down the road.

Indeed, it was such Western intervention - also ostensibly on humanitarian grounds - that was largely responsible for the Malian crisis in the first place.

The 2011 NATO military intervention in Libya effort went well beyond the UN Security Council mandate to protect civilian lives, as the French, British and U.S. air forces - along with ground support by the Saudi and Qatari dictatorships - essentially allied themselves with the rebel armies. The African Union - while highly-critical of Qaddafi's repression - condemned the intervention, fearing that the resulting chaos would result in the Libya's vast storehouse of arms might fueling local and regional conflicts elsewhere in Africa and destabilize the region.

This is exactly what happened.

As of 5:00 PM EST Friday, authorities in multiple Northeastern US states have implemented martial law, due to "the weather."

Facing up to one year in jail and a $1000 fine for merely driving their own cars on public streets and highways, citizens in various areas within the New England region have been hit with executive orders, threatening residents with criminal penalties if they leave their homes and attempt to drive during the current snowstorm.

Using the color of law to impose demands on the public that can only be seen as a massive overreach of power, individuals in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts thus far have been issued bans on driving in those areas.

R.I. Gov. Lincoln Chafee, for instance, has ordered vehicles off of Routes I-95, I-195, RI-146, RI-24 and I-295, beginning at 5 p.m., according to the R.I. Emergency Management Agency.

The planned multibillion-dollar missile shield for Europe is flawed to a degree that it might never be able to fulfill its ostensible goal - protecting the US from Iranian missiles - secret Defense Department studies reveal.

The classified studies were outlined to lawmakers in a briefing by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) which was obtained by the Associated Press.

The four-phase shield, which would be based in select NATO member states and the Mediterranean Sea, would culminate in the deployment of SM-3 Block IIB interceptors. Those interceptors would theoretically protect America and Europe from InterContinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) threats.

But it is this fourth and final stage that has now come under scrutiny. The GAO investigators said that classified reports by the Missile Defense Agency concluded that Romania was a poor location for an interceptor to protect the US. It was also revealed that the Polish site would only work if the US developed capabilities to launch interceptors which could target an Iranian missile while in its short initial phase of powered flight.

The White House has opted not to pursue that capability because it is not viewed to be feasible, said one senior defense official.

President Obama adopted most of President Bush's counter-terrorism policies, argues John Kiriakou - the former CIA official who blew the whistle on the agency's torture practices and is now set to go behind bars for it.

After 9/11 Kiriakou served as the chief of counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan. Now he is heading to prison, having been sentenced to two-and-a-half years.

Despite that, he says he is proud to have played a role in outlawing torture. Voting for Obama, Kiriakou believed that it would bring positive change - but it never came, he told RT. "I never believed I would be going to prison under a President Obama. Never."

RT: You were convicted of revealing the identity of an agent to a freelance reporter who, by the way, never even published it. You said you regretted sharing the name of the agent, of the officer, that you apologized for it. But you also said it was not the reason the government went after you. Why do you think the government went after you?

John Kiriakou: I've never believed that my case was about a leak. I've always believed my case is about torture. When I went on ABC News in December 2007 and I said that not only was the CIA torturing prisoners, but that the torture policy was an official US Government policy that was approved at the very top, by the President of the United States himself, the CIA filed what's called "a crimes report" against me the next day with the Justice Department. The Justice Department never stopped investigating me from December of 2007 until I was finally arrested in January 2012. So to say that this case is a result of a name that was found in attorney's brief at Guantanamo is just simply not true.

An LA police officer under investigation over claims he threatened women with jail time if they refused to have sex with him is now being sued by a man he and another officer beat nearly to death after trying to extort money from him last May.

Officer James Nichols is included with the City of Los Angeles, the LAPD, the police union and John Miller, another officer, in a $20 million lawsuit brought by Brian Mulligan, a former finance executive. Mulligan alleges that Nichols and Miller nearly killed him last year.

Mulligan's lawsuit claims that in addition to the beating, the LAPD and its union engineered a smear campaign against him that resulted in him losing his job.
Mulligan "suffered a broken shoulder blade and facial fractures requiring several surgeries at the hands of police officers after they stopped him in the city's Highland Park neighborhood and forced him to check into a local motel and stay there against his will," according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Friday night on "Real Time with Bill Maher," Maher's first guest was Julian Assange, founder of the website Wikileaks and the author of the book Cypherpunks. Assange was appearing by video from the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he is living as a virtual prisoner for fear of extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted on charges of sexual assault.

Assange, said Maher, is afraid that if he gets extradited to Sweden, he will then get turned over to the U.S., where officials are angry with the Wikileaks founder for leaking thousands of secret documents and diplomatic communiques to the world.

Maher asked Assange why the Swedish government is so eager to cooperate with the U.S. government.

Assange replied that the Swedish government has changed, that once it was quite liberal under the leadership of Prime Minister Olaf Palme, who was assassinated in 1986. Sweden has made a dramatic turn to the right since then.