To read the headlines, it seems that the USA has emerged out of the blue to the point of becoming the world's oil and gas production giant. All thanks to the Shale Revolution. Recently President Obama made various noises that the US could solve the Ukraine gas dependency on Russian gas because of the spectacular growth of extracting natural gas, and more recently, oil, from shale rock formations across the US. There's only one thing wrong with this picture - "It ain't gonna happen..."

The surface numbers are indeed impressive to a layman or politician. According to US Government Energy Information Administration data, between 2005 and 2010 the contribution from shale gas to total US-marketed gas production rose from less than 2% to more than 20%. And 2011 set an all-time record for US production as the result of shale gas growth.

However the shale gas comes from a small number of areas with significant and viable shale rock formations that have trapped gas and oil in the interstices of the sedimentary shale rocks. The main shale gas areas are the Barnett shale in Texas' Fort Worth basin; the Fayetteville and Woodford shales of the Arkoma basin in Arkansas and Oklahoma; the Haynesville shale on the Texas Louisiana boarder; the Marcellus shale in the Appalachian basin, and the most recently exploited, the Eagle Ford shale in southwest Texas.

While the United States has warned against buying Chinese routers due to surveillance concerns, a new book about the Edward Snowden revelations states America has beenintercepting and tinkering with routers intended for foreign customers.

According to Glenn Greenwald - one of the journalists entrusted with Snowden's leaked documents - the National Security Agency has been implanting devices into routers headed overseas since at least 2010.

In an extract from Greenwald's new book, titled No Place to Hide, the journalist states the NSA "routinely receives - or intercepts - routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers."

Once the agency gets its hands on these products, it embeds devices that are linked to the NSA's own system, giving officials access to foreign networks and information from all the users connected to that network.

"In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure," a 2010 NSA report states, according to Greenwald. "This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

The opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has called its predicted landslide win in India's election a "people's victory".

Party president Rajnath Singh said it marked "a new era" for India.

Votes counted so far suggest the BJP is on course for the most resounding victory by any party for 30 years, trouncing the outgoing Congress Party.

After a decade of rule by Congress, the BJP is expected to steer India sharply to the right.

The new prime minister will be Narendra Modi, chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, who is seen as a no-nonsense, can-do leader who stands for development and muscular nationalism, says the BBC's Soutik Biswas.

He campaigned on promises he would revive the country's slowing economic growth. Mr Modi told cheering supporters that the result was a "new chapter" in the history of independent India.

The Yatsenyuk regime's anti-terrorism operations in the southern and eastern oblasts (regions) of Ukraine are really a use of martial force against Ukrainian civilians opposed to the coup-installed regime in Kiev. Predominately peaceful Ukrainian citizens opposing the coup leaders and not "armed separatists" have been the main target of the regime's militias.

The discourse about "pro-Russian" separatists is a misleading attempt to hide the real nature of the protests against the regime, which is opposition to a coup. The main issue is one of anti-coup protesters versus a junta and not separatists and federalists versus Kiev. To refer to the junta in Kiev as the government of Ukraine is to reject or ignore its illegality.

Welcome to Ukraine Nulandistan

Wherever the US government says it is promoting democracy and freedom, as US Assistant-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland professes about Ukraine, there has been destruction, impoverishment, sectarianism, fighting, and death. Welcome to post-coup Ukraine or Nulandistan. It follows the precedents and traditions of destabilization and violence honoured by US officials like Senator John McCain in the Syrian Arab Republic (McCainistan) and by Hillary Clinton in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Clintonistan).

Arseniy Petrovych Yatsenyuk, who has illegally taken the post of Ukrainian prime minister with the support of the US and European Union, was never favoured by many of the authentic protesters in Euro-Maidan or even the grassroots members of his allies. When, without any election or public discussion, he was arbitrarily given the office of prime minister, many in the Euro-Maidan protest movement booed him and some even cried "bullet to his head." His party boss, the infamously corrupt Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko, was booed too after she arrived. In reality, Yatsenyuk and the other Ukrainian politicians identifying themselves with Euro-Maidan, like the ultra-nationalist Svoboda's Oleh Tyahnybok, appropriated the hopes and dreams of the Ukrainians that were protesting against not only the Ukrainian government of Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych, but the entire corrupt Ukrainian political establishment. Hiding behind the protesters, Yatsenyuk and Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna Party used the militias of their ultra-nationalist political allies to launch a violent coup in Kiev.

There is no functioning democracy in Ukraine and, with the full support of the European Union and the US government, free speech inside Ukraine is under attack by the new regime and its thugs. Yatsenyuk's coup-installed regime has cracked down on media freedoms, sent the Ukrainian military and security forces to attack anti-coup protesters under the pretext of NATO-backed anti-terrorism operations, and started purges and witch hunts all over Ukraine. This started with the head of the National Television Company of Ukraine, Aleksandr Panteleymonov, being threatened and beaten into resigning by Svoboda deputies Igor Miroshnynchenko and Andrey Ilyenko.

A German farmer has revealed shocking GMO company tactics to silence him in an exclusive interview with RT Op-Edge.

German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land.

After spending two years in prison, Glöckner is traveling round the world to tell the story and warn the public of the extreme danger of GMO seeds.

Reporters and their editors (and the corporations that employ them) have the power to shape readers' perceptions by, for instance, choosing what fact to put first in a story or which expert to quote in what context. But the most powerful tool is the simplest: the headline. Because many people read only that, and many others have their perception of an article shaped by the first words they see, this sentence fragment is frequently as important as everything that comes after.

New authorities in post-coup Kiev have listed the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as terrorist organizations. The two regions proclaimed themselves sovereign states after the controversial May 11 referendums.

"The two so-called 'people's republics' in Donetsk and Lugansk regions are terrorist organizations, which have a clear hierarchy, financing, and channels of weapons supplies," Ukraine's deputy prosecutor general, Nikolay Golomsha, said.


The statement confirmed a similar statement made by Ukraine's minister of justice, Pavel Petrenko. The minister said the two "were created for assaulting people, intimidation, sabotage, terrorist attacks, beatings, and murder of our citizens."

BRET BAIER: People on the ground testified that they knew where the ambassador was, that they were military in their precision. It was not guys coming to protest. They had mortars and heavy weapons.

TOMMY VIETOR: Bret, a couple of things. I was in the Situation Room that night, okay. We didn't know where the ambassador was definitively.

BAIER: Was the president in the Situation Room?

VIETOR: No. And the fact that your network at one time reported that he watched video feed of the attack as it was ongoing is part of what I think is a pattern of inaccurate --

BAIER: Where was the president?

The old words are on the rebound, the ones that went out in the last century when the very idea of a Gilded Age, and the plutocrats and oligarchy of wealth that went with it, left the scene in the Great Depression. Now, those three classic terms that were never to return (or so it once seemed) are back in our vocabularies. They've been green-lighted by society. (If they're not on SAT tests in the coming years, I'll eat my top hat.)

Of course, an inequality gap has been widening into an abyss for decades now, but when it comes to the present boom in old-fashioned words that once went with being really, really, obscenely wealthy and powerful, give the Occupy movement of 2011 credit. After all, they were the ones who took what should already have been on everyone's lips -- the raging inequality in American society -- out of the closet and made it part of the national conversation. 1%! 99%!

House Republicans accused the Obama administration Thursday of "perhaps criminal" behavior for having withheld for months key email that sheds light on how the administration framed its post-Benghazi talking points, potentially violating a congressional subpoena.

House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said Secretary of State John F. Kerry will have to come before Congress to explain why his department refused to release the email until forced to do so by a judge.

Meanwhile, a retired Air Force brigadier general who was in the U.S. Africa Command's headquarters the night of the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic post in Benghazi testified that he and others quickly realized the assault was spawned by terrorists. The general said it was either negligence or willful ignorance that led the White House, amid a re-election campaign, to say the violence was ignited by anger over a video.