According to Ukrainian presidential adviser, thousands of much better trained troops are now in rotation in the east of the country
Since the ceasefire regime in Ukraine's east took effect, Kiev's authorities have redeployed there several hundred armoured vehicles, Ukrainian presidential adviser Yuri Lutsenko told Ukrainian television on Wednesday.

"I have no right to specify the figure, but I assure you: hundreds of armoured vehicles have been moved to the front these days. And thousands of much better trained troops are now in rotation," he said.

On Monday, similar statements were made by spokesman for the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Andrei Lysenko. According to him, the ceasefire in the east of Ukraine has allowed Kiev's security forces to regroup, optimise operation of the defence industry enterprises and complete the third mobilisation wave.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko last week gave a similar assessment to the ceasefire results. He said during a trip to Lviv that Kiev should effectively use the ceasefire regime in order to improve the defense and boost the army's combat effectiveness.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday it will soon announce new travel-related recommendations aimed at stopping the spread of Ebola in the United States, and indicated the new measures would be announced later this week.

CDC Director Tom Frieden didn't say whether the new recommendations would include a ban on flights from the three West African countries that have suffered an Ebola outbreak. But he did say the steps are related to travel, and said he knows many Americans are worried about how international travel could contribute to an outbreak in the United States.

"As the president said yesterday, we're looking hard at what we can do to further increase the safety of Americans, and in the coming days, we will announce further measures that will be taken," Frieden said.

Aside from a travel ban, the steps could include enhanced screening of passengers coming to the United States, and efforts to improve the tracking of passengers who might be trying to come to the United States indirectly.

One specific change that could be coming is requiring people who arrive in the United States to have their temperature checked and to fill out a questionnaire about their activities while overseas. Those steps are already required of people boarding planes in West Africa, and Frieden said the CDC is looking "very carefully" at those ideas.

Our readers may agree with us when we say that reality can be fairly depressing, to say the least! Sometimes it reaches a point where things get so bad, people must find all sorts of ways to deal with it. Some may choose to shut down and find a means of escape and distract themselves by dissociating. Others may feel numb and desensitized. Others may fall into a deep depression, while others may not have cared from the beginning. And yet, despite the grim global picture, some continue speaking up (like we do here on SOTT). If the world wasn't governed by psychopaths, this could be a wonderful place, couldn't it?

There are several ways to speak up and we believe that now it is the time to do it! One can share facts and expose lies in a serious manner. One can also simply share his or her opinion via the social networks. One can show indignation or righteous anger, where it belongs and in many different ways.

Well, this time we have decided to use yet another tactic to counteract lies and propaganda: Humor! We selected a song that many of you may know, from The Sound of Music. As you will see, the lyrics have been modified slightly, and it's not about Maria, but about one of the main perpetrators of crime and suffering in the world. Despite having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, full of empty promises of "Hope" and "Change", this character manipulated the masses and destroyed his own and other countries in the typical American way. He was probably put in power for that purpose. But his smile doesn't fool many people any more. Have you guessed who this song is about yet? You probably have.

So, plug in your microphone, and sing along! The lyrics are available in the video for you to be able to join in. Let your voice be heard by many, and share it around!

When the first ISIS 'beheading' video was released I was immediately struck by how utterly counter-productive it was for the 'Islamic State' to produce a glossy, high-definition video of the event and make it available to Western audiences. If the goal of such a dubious PR campaign was to intimidate the anglo-American Empire into backing off from attacking the alleged Levantine 'rebels', then it failed miserably.

What's most amazing however is that the IS leadership were unable to foresee that lopping the heads off US and UK citizens and producing a made for TV video of the gruesome spectacle would simply gift the anglo-American Empire builders with the justification to launch a bombing campaign against the video makers. I mean, how politically ignorant do you have to be to not realise that? Did they learn nothing from the 9/11 attacks? Western civilian casualties are the US military industrial complex's bread and butter! They use Western civilian casualties of Arab terrorism to justify the invasion and occupation of the Arab countries that the erstwhile Arab terrorists are trying to rid of US occupation!

Even the kids in the schoolyard know it's a bad idea to kick the bully in the shins, he'll just turn around and knock your head off. It's definitely an unequal exchange. So why would anyone in their right mind pursue such a strategy? I'm assuming that the leaders of ISIL are 'in their right minds' because they've shown themselves perspicacious and able enough to mount a successful blitzkrieg through northern Iraq. You don't do that without being somewhat proficient in military strategy. Seems to me we need to look for an alternative narrative about what the role of ISIL really is.

Though everyone adheres to Washington and its Gulf allies' anti-terrorist discourse, everyone understands that it is only a rhetorical justification for a war that has other purposes. The United States say they want to destroy the Islamic Emirate which they created and which performs for them the ethnic cleansing necessary to its plan for the remodeling of the "Broader Middle East". Stranger still, they say they want to fight in Syria alongside the moderate opposition which is composed of the same jihadists. Finally, they destroyed Rakka buildings that had been evacuated two days earlier by the Islamic Emirate. For Thierry Meyssan, behind these apparent contradictions the gas war continues.
US air campaign in Iraq and Syria is puzzling: it is impossible to destroy a terrorist group exclusively by air strikes. In Iraq, the United States and the GCC coupled their actions with those of Iraqi troops and Kurdish ground forces. In Syria, they have no serious force to fight against the Islamic Emirate. And even in this case, "the bombings are not able to affect the capacity of the Islamic Emirate or its operations in other parts of Iraq or Syria," according to General William Mayville, chief of operations at the US Chiefs of Staff. [1]

Moreover, and despite official declarations, the Islamic Emirate is a creation of the United States and the GCC, and it unflaggingly serves their interests:

- In May 2013, Senator John McCain came to Syria illegally to meet the staff of the Free Syrian Army (moderate), including Abu Youssef, also known as Abu Du'a, alias Ibrahim al-Baghdadi, the current caliph Ibrahim (Head of the extremists) [2].

- In January 2014, Reuters revealed that President Obama had called a secret session of Congress during which it voted to fund and arm the "rebels" in Syria, including those of the Islamic Emirate until September 2014 [3]. It was indeed a secret session and not just behind closed doors. The entire American press complied with the censorship of this information.

- Proud of this acknowledgement, Saudi state television clamored the fact that the Islamic Emirate was headed by Prince Abdul Rahman al-Faisal. [4]

- Meanwhile the head of Israeli military intelligence, General Aviv Kochavi, warned against a proliferation of anti-Syrian fighters and found that members of al-Qaida, including those of the Islamic Emirate (which it had not yet divorced) were trained in three camps in Turkey [under NATO control] located in Şanlıurfa, Osmaniye and Karaman. [5]

'Terror sword' or plastic decoration?

A plastic sword removed from a Sydney home during recent terror raids is a common part of Shiite Muslim household and not of the religious tradition Islamic State fighters adhere to.

It was one of the most frightening, powerful images to emerge from counter-terrorism raids across Sydney last month.

As one man was charged with conspiring to behead a random person in Sydney's CBD, police removed a sword in an evidence bag from a Marsfield home.

But the owner of the menacing item has revealed that it is actually a plastic decoration common in almost every Shiite Muslim household.

Community leader Jamal Daoud said the sword would be found in almost every Shiite household.

Mustafa Dirani, a 21-year-old part-time painter, was detained and his parents' Marsfield home raided at dawn on September 18 as part of the Joint Counter-Terrorism Team's Operation Appleby.

He said he doesn't know Omarjan Azari, who was detained, along with two of Azari's brothers, when their Guildford home was raided on the same day.

Azari, 22, was charged with conspiring to commit a terrorist act after allegedly speaking to terrorist Mohammad Ali Baryalei via phone and taking orders to seize a random person from the city's streets and behead them.

Dirani was detained and later released without charge.

Twitter, the world's largest microblogging platform, on Tuesday sued the U.S. government, alleging that the Justice Department's restrictions on what the company can say publicly about the government's national security requests for user data violate the firm's First Amendment rights.

With its lawsuit, the San Francisco-based firm is seeking to go further than five other technology companies that earlier this year reached a settlement with the government on the permissible scope of disclosure at a time of heightened concern about the scale of government surveillance.

"It's our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users' concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance - including what types of legal process have not been received," Ben Lee, a Twitter vice president, said in a post online. "We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges."

In a post-Edward Snowden world in which technology companies are striving to reassure customers about their commitment to privacy, Twitter is pressing for the ability to be more candid in its twice-a-year transparency reports than the government has been willing to permit.

Tech firms may now report the numbers of requests they receive from the government in broad bands - such as zero to 999, for instance. Twitter would like to be able to disclose the exact number of national-security-related orders received in any particular category - including zero, if that is the case.

Prince Nasser of Bahrain, who is accused of involvement in the torture of detainees during a pro-democracy uprising in the island kingdom in 2011, is not immune from prosecution, the High Court in London ruled Tuesday.

Judges overturned the Crown Prosecution Service's decision that the Prince had state immunity from prosecution. The ruling could mean the prince may be arrested in the UK if he ever returns to British soil.

In May this year it emerged that a Bahraini citizen, referred to as FF, sought the arrest of Prince Nasser. He accused the prince of being involved in the torture of three prisoners in April 2011 - claims that the Bahrain government "categorically denies."

FF, who was granted asylum and now lives in Britain, called the Crown Prosecution Service's decision to grant immunity to the son of Bahrain's king "erroneous in law."

Predictive technology is exploding, in stealth, across the virtual landscape. The arrival of Big Data initiatives by government, as well as a massive industry of data brokers is not only putting privacy at risk, but is offering those with access to the information unprecedented ways to manage the lives of everyday citizens.

The viral story of Facebook using their algorithms to go beyond surveillance and actually manipulate the emotions of users as a type of psychology experiment has caused consternation among anyone who might have had illusions of social media privacy, or beneficent intentions of offering free peer-to-peer communication.

Twitter is the latest to seek new ways to utilize its massive database of public information. It has granted MIT's Media Lab $10 million to analyze all communications beginning with the very first post in 2006.

It isn't specified exactly what the focus of the research will be, but there are some indications that it will be an attempt to further highlight budding social movements in order to potentially counter them with propaganda.

One major theme the lab will explore: the tendency of social media to be better at generating negative energy than positive energy. "It's better at disrupting or stopping things, or having your voice heard," says Roy. "It's harder to harness that into sustained change. It's not like there's a silver bullet in technology, but there may be tools that can start to get beyond that disruptive potential." He also says the lab could build tools for journalists that would help them monitor trends in media as a way to inform their coverage. ( Source ) [emphasis added]

That same Bloomberg article also mentions Reddit and Wikipedia as two more targets for such research.

"I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden's killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.

But that is not, and never was, the purpose of the War on Terror. It was designed from the start to be endless."

- Glenn Greenwald, in his latest piece for the Intercept.

Leon Panetta is pretty much the epitome of a status quo insider. Someone, who due to his influence and mainstream veneer of respectability, is capable of inflicting an almost inconceivable amount of damage to freedom and prosperity in America. In fact, you could say that Mr. Panetta is as responsible as almost anyone else for the banana republic laughing stock that this nation has been transformed into over the past several decades. Why? Because he served in top positions for several of America's Presidents over that time.

He started out working for Richard Nixon, before switching parties and serving nine terms as a Democratic Congressman from California. He then served the Clinton Administration, including as Chief of Staff. Most recently, he was head of the Department of Defense and the CIA under Obama. This is an extremely political animal.

His ties run deepest with the Clintons, and while he criticizes Obama heavily in his new book, he excitedly proclaims that Hilary Clinton would be "great president," and that "one thing about the Clintons is, they want to get it done."

I'm sure they do, but get what done exactly. In the case of of Bill Clinton, it was dismantling Glass Steagall, and fully turning over the entire U.S. economy and public policy to financial oligarchs.

Think I am exaggerating? In a recent USA Today interview, we can clearly see exactly what "getting it done" would mean during a Hilary Clinton Presidency: Endless War.