Armed with weapons of mass destruction and a history of committing some of the worst crimes to humanity, how far will the USA go to maintain economic, political and military dominance? See the following video and transcript:

Has there ever been a major holiday more focused on materialism than the modern American Christmas? This year, Americans are planning to spend an average of 830 dollars on Christmas gifts, which represents a jump of 110 dollars over the average of 720 dollars last year.

But have our incomes gone up accordingly? Of course not.

In fact, real median household income in the United States has been experiencing a steady long-term decline. So in order to fund all of our Christmas spending, we have got to go into even more debt. We love to pull out our credit cards and spend money that we do not have on lots of cheap, useless stuff made on the other side of the world by workers making slave labor wages.

We do the same thing year after year, and most of us have grown accustomed to the endless cycle of growing debt. In fact, one Pew survey found that approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that "debt is a necessity in their lives". But then we have to work our fingers to the bone to try to make the payments on all of that debt, not realizing that debt systematically impoverishes us.

It may be hard to believe, but if you have a single dollar in your pocket and no debt, you have a greater net worth than 25 percent of all Americans. I know that sounds crazy, but it is true.

Bay Area activists pulled off an awesome action yesterday at Ha'aretz's Zionism 3.0: Israel's Place in Tomorrow's World conference in Palo Alto, California. As Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely was introduced and stepped up to the podium a clear voice rang out:

"Tzipi Hotovely this is a citizens' arrest! We charge you with inciting colonial violence"

A prominent Israeli settler ran over a 16-year-old Palestinian girl and then shot her dead, saying that he believed she intended to carry out a stabbing attack at Huwarra checkpoint in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus, Israeli media reported.

The Palestinian military liaison office identified the teenager as Ashraqat Taha Ahmad Qatanani from Nablus, and said they had notified her family of their daughter's death. Israeli news site Ynet identified the man who ran over and shot Qatanani as Gershon Mesika, the former head of the "Samaria regional council," which represents Israel's illegal settlements in the northern West Bank.

After running the girl over with his car and landing in a ditch, Mesika reportedly got out of his car and opened fire on the girl, alongside Israeli forces who also opened fire, Israeli media reported. An Israeli army spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked for comment. No Israelis were reported injured in the alleged attack.


The girl's death was the second violent incident in 24 hours. On Saturday evening, a Palestinian, identified as Muhammad Shaker al-Tarda,18, stabbed and wounded four Israelis, including a 13-year-old girl, in the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, before being arrested hours later, Israeli police said.

Israeli police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld said at the time that an Israeli man was seriously wounded and two women and a 13-year-old girl moderately wounded in what he described as a "confirmed terrorist attack," which took place on the city's King David Street. Shortly afterwards, Israeli police said that a mob of Israeli civilians violently beat and bound the hands of a Palestinian Bedouin man they incorrectly believed was the attacker.

The four Israelis and the Bedouin were evacuated to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon. Two days earlier, four Israelis and one Palestinian were killed in two separate attacks in Tel Aviv and the illegal settlement bloc of Gush Etzion in the southern West Bank. The Palestinian attackers were afterwards arrested.

At least 12 people have died after a bus carrying the Tunisian presidential guard exploded on a main road in Tunis.

The blast occurred on Mohamed V Avenue, at the heart of the Tunisian capital, according to a spokesman for the North African country's Interior Ministry.

The spokesman had previously said that six people had died, but later updated the death toll to 12.

Interior Ministry spokesman Walid Louguini said at least 12 were killed and 16 wounded in what the government considers a "terrorist act."

Police have killed over 1,000 people in 2015, and about 20 percent of those killed were completely unarmed.

As of Monday evening, U.S. police had killed 1,024 people since the start of the year, according to The Counted, a continuously updated database of U.S. police killings maintained by The Guardian. Of the total, 203 victims of police were unarmed.

In November alone police killed 10 unarmed males, including Jamar Clark, the 24-year-old man whose death led to in ongoing protests in Minneapolis, and Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old who was shot by police in Louisiana during a chase. (Body camera footage showed that the two officers involved in Mardis' death fired recklessly into the car driven by Chris Few, the boy's father, who was also injured in the incident. The two officers have been arrested.)

Despite claims America's police forces need to be highly armed in order to defend themselves against a "war on cops," just 34 police were fatally shot and three others died of assault in the line of duty so far this year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks police deaths in the United States.

A white Chicago policeman was charged with murder on Tuesday in the October 2014 shooting of a black teenager, a day before the planned release of a video taken by a police vehicle's dashboard camera showing the young man was shot 16 times.

A state prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, said in a statement that the officer, Jason Van Dyke, was being processed at Chicago's main criminal courthouse and would appear at a bond hearing at noon CST (1:00 p.m. ET).

Last week, a Cook County judge ordered the release of the dashcam video showing the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, and Chicago authorities said they would make it public on Wednesday. The city has already paid McDonald's family a $5 million civil settlement even though they did not file a lawsuit.

"I wish I can go back to Libya," Hussein, a refugee living on the outskirts of Paris, told Mic. "It's war, but at least it's better there."

Speaking in Arabic, Hussein was translated by Asma Ajroudi, a Tunisian freelance journalist working with refugees. Hussein feared that his family, who still live in Libya, would be targeted by ruling powers if he was critical of his country, so he requested anonymity.

"Journalists betrayed me," he said, regarding his initial hesitation to talk. "This is why I don't like speaking to them. Everyone says they are here to help and [to] tell our story, but once they get their money they are gone and they never come back."

Hussein said he was imprisoned in Libya for essentially being black.

Property prices across almost all the 28 EU member states have increased and have grown faster than incomes. The price correction of the post 2008 era fizzled out due to zero interest rate policy by the global central banks. The price-income ratios are still not back in line, effectively creating another debt fuelled housing bubble.

The latest data available for poverty in the EU highlights that more than a third of the population is at risk of poverty or social exclusion in five EU Member States: Bulgaria (48.0 %), Romania (40.4 %), Greece (35.7 %), Latvia (35.1 %) and Hungary (33.5 %). At the other end of the scale, the lowest shares of persons being at risk of poverty or social exclusion were recorded in Sweden (16.4 %), Finland (16.0 %), the Netherlands (15.9 %) and the Czech Republic (14.6 %).

Housing is of course by far the most income consuming expenditure, followed largely by heating and food.

27.6% of children and 18.3% of pensioners in the EU now live in poverty. By contrast as Global Research mentioned in a report on Libya "In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had turned Libya into Africa's wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands."

Remember those old ads showing a senior couple lounging on a warm beach, captioned "Let your money work for you"? Or the scene in Mary Poppins where young Michael is being advised to put his tuppence in the bank, so that it can compound into "all manner of private enterprise," including "bonds, chattels, dividends, shares, shipyards, amalgamations . . . ."?

That may still work if you're a Wall Street banker, but if you're an ordinary saver with your money in the bank, you may soon be paying the bank to hold your funds rather than the reverse.

Four European central banks - the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank, Sweden's Riksbank, and Denmark's Nationalbank - have now imposed negative interest rates on the reserves they hold for commercial banks; and discussion has turned to whether it's time to pass those costs on to consumers. The Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve are still at ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy), but several Fed officials have also begun calling for NIRP (negative rates).