In his latest Gold Videocast, Peter Schiff meets with Jim Rickards, author of The Death of Money, for an exclusive interview about gold's role in the international currency wars.

Jim Rickards is Chief Global Strategist at the West Shore Funds, and Director of The James Rickards Project, an inquiry into the complex dynamics of geopolitics + global capital. In The Death of Money, Rickards shows why another monetary system collapse is rapidly approaching - and why this time, nothing less than the institution of money itself is at risk. Fortunately, it's not too late to prepare for the coming death of money. Rickards explains the power of converting unreliable money into real wealth, such as gold and other long-term stores of value.

Finland will impose no additional sanctions on Russia in response to Moscow's ban of food imports from some EU countries, said Finnish Prime Minister before the presidents of the two countries are set to meet on Friday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The Russian President will meet his Finnish counterpart Sauli Niinist in Sochi, on Russia's Black Sea coast, where Putin has a residence on Friday, the president's press service said. Niinist is the first president of a European country to visit Russia in an official capacity since the escalation of the crisis in Ukraine.

The heads of state are to discuss the "peaceful settlement of the internal political crisis in Ukraine and measures to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe", the Kremlin said. Among other issues the presidents will talks about the current state and prospects of bilateral cooperation between Russia and Finland, the Kremlin added.

Over 70 people have been killed in the Donetsk Region, and 116 others have been wounded over the last three days of fighting in eastern Ukraine, according to a statement by regional authorities.

The Ukrainian army has been shelling Donetsk and its suburbs overnight as well. On Tuesday, the military seized a key train station near Donetsk.

Many civilians are also feared dead after Kiev authorities resumed shelling of eastern districts in Lugansk, the city council reported. No figures for the number of casualties are known yet.

"According to residents' reports, eastern Lugansk came under intensive artillery attack on Wednesday," the city council said on its website. "Witnesses say that as a result of the shelling, many civilians have been killed and wounded."

The city has been without water, electricity and fuel for almost two weeks.

Fifteen people were killed and 19 injured in mortar fire in Donetsk region's village of Zugres on Wednesday, local authorities said, citing health officials. Among those killed were three children.

Russians must consolidate and develop their country, neither sliding into isolationism nor sacrificing their dignity for the sake of pleasing anyone, President Vladimir Putin declared.

"We have to develop our country with calm, dignity and efficiency, without barricading ourselves from the outer world or breaking ties with partners, but also without allowing anyone to treat us with disrespect," he told Russian MPs in Yalta, Crimea.

He called on a consolidation of the people, "not for the sake of any wars or conflict," but "for an industrious labor force for Russia and in Russia's name."

The president defended sanctions of food imports, which the Russian government imposed in response to several rounds of anti-Russian sanctions of the West.

"It's not just a response. First of all, it's support for domestic producers and the opening of our markets to the countries and producers, who want and are willing to cooperate with Russia," Putin said.

OSCE observers have not detected any troop movement on the Russian-Ukrainian border at the Gukovo and Donetsk checkpoints, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission said in a weekly report on Wednesday.

People crossing the border can be divided into several groups: families on foot or travelling by car with a lot of luggage; elderly people with few bags; adults with no luggage or empty cars; and people wearing military-style dress with or without backpacks, the report said.

Over the past several days, some 2,000-3000 people were going through the Gukovo checkpoint every day, two-thirds of them entering Russia and one-third heading to Ukraine, observers said, adding that some were going to the neighbouring country for one-day trips and others in order to renew their migration cards.

Throughout the week, detonations and gun fire were heard. These incidents were quickly assessed as not combat related and were the result of securing the roads from unexploded ordinances.

The flow of people at the Donetsk checkpoint was larger than at Gukovo, observers said. About 5,500 people were crossing the border every day, with more than 80% of them going to Russia as a result of the deterioration of the overall situation eastern Ukraine.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has demanded a full list of items contained in Russia's relief convoy bound for southeast Ukraine, a Red Cross source told ITAR-TASS on Wednesday.

"The ICRC needs a detailed list of items contained in the trucks in order to be able to accept the aid after Ukrainian border guards finish the customs formalities," the source explained.

The International Red Cross officials confirmed the Russian side had informed them about the relief cargo the day before on Tuesday.

"The Russian authorities handed over a list of goods to the Ukrainian authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross. It includes essentials, bottled water, food and power generators," the Red Cross official said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in previous reports that the relief cargo contained 69 sets of power generators; 400 tonnes of groats; 340 tonnes of canned meat; 30 tonnes of salt; 100 tonnes of sugar; 60 tonnes of canned milk; 0.8 tonnes of tea; 679.5 tonnes of bottled water, 62.4 tonnes of baby food; 54 tonnes of medical products and 12,300 sleeping bags.

Meanwhile, the International Red Cross headquarters in Geneva said the ICRC was staying in contact with Russian and Ukrainian leaderships given that the two sides had to clarify a huge number of issues, including border passage and customs clearance.

The Russian Foreign Ministry slammed in its statement on Wednesday Australian authorities' accusations that Russia was responsible for the ongoing "tragic events in Ukraine, including the crash of the Malaysian passenger jet" as unacceptable and ungrounded.

"On the whole, It seems that burdened by their own oversized ambitions, some members of the current Australian government have completely lost an adequate picture of the developments in Ukraine and around it," the statement said.


"They keep making absurd statements that the humanitarian convoy to help civilians in the south-east of Ukraine can be used as a pretext for Russia's 'armed invasion' of the neighbouring country," the ministry said.

"Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has gone farther than others in making irresponsible innuendoes against our country even though one would think that her position presupposes building bridges between countries, not destroying them," the ministry said.

Now that Hillary the hawk has been fully un-caged, thanks to her interview with former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg, the flak is flying. Moveon.org is trying to clip her wings and the Obama fan club is outraged. Of course, if she were running for Prime Minister of Israel - Peter Beinart dubbed her "the Israeli government's best spokesman" for sounding even more hardline than Bibi on Gaza - her path to power might be a bit easier: but, alas, America is an entirely different country, one capable of war-weariness, and anti-interventionist sentiments are at an all-time high.

In the course of her interview with Goldberg she went on about how we should've armed the Syrian rebels - the same rebels who are now wreaking devastation in Iraq - because we might have "vetted" them and somehow transformed them into Jeffersonian democrats. And she went on to blast the President's relative aversion to military intervention - relative, that is, to her own proclivity for armed "humanitarianism": "'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle," Hillary scolded.

You could almost hear interviewer Goldberg's gasp of pure delight at this little bon mot, but Hillary's presumed constituency wasn't exactly thrilled:

"MoveOn.org issued a stark warning to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in response to her not-so-subtle knock on President Barack Obama's foreign policy approach.

"In a statement on Tuesday Ilya Sheyman, the executive director of MoveOn Political Action, said that Clinton or 'any other person thinking about seeking the Democratic nomination in 2016, should think long and hard before embracing the same policies advocated by right-wing war hawks that got America into Iraq in the first place and helped set the stage for Iraq's troubles.'"

On the other side of the barricades, the powerful interventionist faction of the Democratic party establishment was over the moon:"Josh Block, president of the Israel Project, said it is 'important' to see a Democratic leader laying out a worldview 'that recognizes the role of our values and very real threats and trends facing the U.S. and our allies today.'

''It struck me as the reemergence of common sense in Democratic foreign policy after a period of drift and indecision,' Block added."

This presentation focuses on the myriad ways in which the powers-that-be in the United States have been systematically dumbing down Americans as a society for a very long time - all by meticulously calculated design. Originally the term dumbing down was used as a slang expression in 1933 by film screenwriters to mean "revising [the script] so as to appeal to those of lower education or intelligence."

The most obvious example of how Americans have been dumbed down is through this nation's failed public education system. At one time not that long ago America reigned supreme as a leading model for the rest of the world providing the best quality free public K-12 education system on the planet. But over the last many decades while much of the rest of the world has been passing us by, it seems an insidious federal agenda has been implemented to condition and brainwash a population of mindless, robotic citizenry that simply does what it's told, and of course the brainwashing commences early in America's schools.

But prior to delving into the many ways we've been duped and dumbed down through the years, a cold hard look at the devastating result seems very much in order here. With doom and gloom warnings of impending collapse, the US economy is floundering still mired in recession, emaciated and cut off from life support, as a consequence of waging too many wars around the world (be they the longest running costly defeats in US history or the fast rising dirty little Special Ops wars secretly raging on every corner of the globe or Obama's personal favorite, state sponsored terrorism from drone-filled skies). As a pawn to the military industrial complex, the US government has chosen permanent war over its own people. This treasonous decision has decimated the middle class and created a college educated indentured class struggling in heavy debt to find any means to stay afloat. With an outsourced, now vanished manufacturing base, upward mobility and the American dream have become tragic casualties of modern life, now a sad, nostalgic bygone reminder of the once greatness of America.

With the US the biggest debtor nation on earth, Americans are drowning in debt as hopelessly trapped collateral damage from a rapidly sinking, overextended Empire desperate to remain the sole global superpower even if it means death to the whole human race. At home the hapless American population has become increasingly the victim of its own government's tyranny and oppression under the constant roving eyeball of criminal surveillance and a brutal militarized security state, leaving its citizens defenseless without any security, liberty, freedom or place to hide. After centuries of carefully orchestrated design, oligarchs of the banking cabal have finally gotten what they've been plotting and scheming, globally enforced austerity and impoverishment reducing life in America and around the world to near Third World status, and absolute control. The oligarchs are counting on a dumbed down population too busy addicted to their video games or watching sports or Kim Kardashian's latest wardrobe malfunction to even notice that a longtime oligarch eugenics plan is already well underway.

Anti-Russian Western sanctions have produced little effect on the country's arms trade, the state arms exporter said. Russia imports few arms from Western countries, while traditional markets for Russian weapons export haven't joined the sanctions.

"The sanctions didn't affect our arms markets. They are traditional, and we still have them. The purchases of our arms will not go down," Igor Sevastyanov, deputy head of Rosoboronexport told journalists on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Sevastyanov's boss Anatoly Isaikin said that Rosoboronexport expects arms sales to foreign buyers to remain steady until 2016. Russia sold $13 billion worth of weapons in 2013, with about 37 percent of that in aircraft, 26 percent going to air defense systems, 21 percent to tanks and other army weapons, and 12 percent to naval sales.

The sanctions could affect Russian military cooperation with Europe, but that would have marginal effect, according to Sevastyanov.