Cold and snow records were broken around the world last month, but the US got the worst of it, with all 50 states having snow on the ground even before winter had officially begun. Northern Mexico and East Asia are experiencing their harshest winter in decades, while some parts of Australia were startled by snow in summer.

Floods continued to wreak havoc in the Philippines and Indonesia, with thousands displaced, while heavy rain in Albania flooded thousands of homes and tore down roads and bridges.

California was scorched by widespread wildfires that burned up to 280,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, with the Thomas Fire becoming the largest and most destructive wildfire in California's history. With an 'atmospheric river' and downpours predicted for the 1st week of January 2018, things are looking gloomy for the Sunshine State.

A high level of volcanic activity was seen around the world in December, while a deadly 6.5 earthquake hit the Indonesian island of Java.

Meteors sightings increased in December, with more and more reports of accompanying "mysterious loud booms", very likely the space rocks exploding overhead.

Atmospheric phenomena, including iridescent clouds and "strange lights in the sky," continued to impress people from Sweden to Eastern Russia, but such events are likely evidence of a distinct cooling of the atmosphere, one of many signs of the possible onset of a new ice age.

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America's foreign policy increasingly looks like the final scene from Scarface. After North Korea, Russia, China, Venezuela, Myanmar, Syria, Hezbollah, Palestine and Iran, the latest country to be in the crosshairs of globalists is Pakistan. However, as usual, there's more to the story than the propaganda. The real, unspoken reason behind the drama is America's anti-China strategy, so let's analyze the big picture.

The official US talking points scapegoat Pakistan for terrorism in Afghanistan. The repeated mantra is that Taliban and the Haqqani network of terrorists sneak in from Pakistan and attack US troops in Afghanistan. While there's some truth to this, the bloviating experts ignore that 40% of Afghanistan is now under Taliban control.
17 years of U.S. presence, 2,300 dead and 20,000 wounded American soldiers, and $800 billion later... the Taliban are as powerful as they have ever been. In 2017 alone, the Taliban killed over 10,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers. In a country where 70% of adults are illiterate and more than a third of the population live in extreme poverty - living under $2 a day - it's not hard to recruit fighters and suicide bombers.

Oprah Winfrey, the American queen of TV talk shows, is reportedly set to run for the US presidency - and liberal Hollywood and media are ecstatic at the prospect.

"Oprah for president" has broken out like a delirium across social media after the TV star made an "electrifying" speech at the Hollywood Golden Globes ceremony last weekend in which she spoke eloquently in defense of women over sexual harassment and for racial minorities.


"A new day is on the horizon," declared the 63-year-old African-American Winfrey, who is one of the most recognized celebrities in America after decades hosting a top-rated talk show.

CNN and other liberal media outlets who hate Republican President Donald Trump with a vengeance, think that they have found their political savior in Oprah. She would be the "perfect anti-Trump candidate," reported CNN on breaking the news from "close friends" that Oprah is considering a run for the White House at the next election in 2020.

In this extract from his new book, Johann Hari, who took antidepressants for 14 years, calls for a new approach

In the 1970s, a truth was accidentally discovered about depression - one that was quickly swept aside, because its implications were too inconvenient, and too explosive. American psychiatrists had produced a book that would lay out, in detail, all the symptoms of different mental illnesses, so they could be identified and treated in the same way across the United States. It was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In the latest edition, they laid out nine symptoms that a patient has to show to be diagnosed with depression - like, for example, decreased interest in pleasure or persistent low mood. For a doctor to conclude you were depressed, you had to show five of these symptoms over several weeks.

There's a scourge plaguing the children of today; an outdated, outmoded concept that continues to interfere with the freedom our children need and deserve. That scourge is best friends. Having a best friend is a terror upon childhood, and it needs to be stopped.

Or so says Dr. Barbara Greenberg , PhD, child and adolescent psychologist, in an op-ed piece for U.S. News. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. What Dr. Greenberg actually says is that there's "merit to the movement to ban having best friends," and goes on to argue for that "merit". Apparently this is a thing, with Greenberg citing best-friend-banning as being an "emerging trend among European schools, and now some American schools as well." She doesn't give any reference for this, so I guess we'll just have to take her word for it (OK, I looked it up. It's a thing).

When I first encountered the headline of the piece, "Should Schools Ban Kids From Having Best Friends?", my first thought was, 'No, of course not. What a silly idea'. And reading the piece in its entirety didn't do anything to change my mind. The argument can be boiled down to 'because feelings', and outright ignores the importance of friendship and particularly best friends.

Before the end of last year, protests broke out in Iran, quickly hijacked by rioters on the streets and neocons on Twitter. Economic demands, criticisms of the Islamic rulers, calls for all-out regime change: distinctions between the various demands were ignored by Western pundits eager to capitalize on the unrest and frame it in terms of their own myopic worldview. The hysteria has largely died down, but not the hypocrisy. Such protests are dealt with more harshly in Western democracies, but you wouldn't think it by looking at the news commentary.

Meanwhile, the war of blustery rhetoric between arch trolls Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump reached heights of comedic mastery in a comparison of nuclear-button-size. While those without a sense of humor worried about post-apocalyptic dystopia, the effect has been quite the opposite: North Korea calling for direct peace talks with their neighbors in the South.

As for the serialized slapstick comedy known as Russiagate, the "prosecution's" case continues to fall apart as the DOJ, FBI, and DNC are repeatedly exposed as dim-witted, naive marks for unsophisticated con-men like Chris Steele and his mentally deranged supporters. Once again, clown-in-chief Trump ends up looking like the sane one.

Tune in to Behind the Headlines at 6-8pm CET (4-6pm UTC / 12-2pm EST), on the SOTT Radio Network.

Running Time: 01:54:56

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2018 is going to be a fun fun year. And to better prepare yourself for all the merrymaking here is a calendar of some of the more delightful things to look forward to.

Twitter is a bizarre place. Depending on the circumstances, it can be both immensely helpful and potentially dangerous at the same time.

A vast majority of tweets seem to fall into the "meaningless fluff" category; superficial, nonsensical and relevant to only a select few of the person's followers. Being that less than a quarter of Americans are reported to be active on this particular social media platform suggests that many conversations will end up being dominated by the more vocal and politically extreme on either end of the spectrum.

For those of us who prefer more in-depth, detailed information, Twitter seems to work best when a tweet redirects to a specific article that has the space to effectively articulate the author's point of view, and that bolsters their arguments with data from various sources.

Many do try and use Twitter to form a cogent argument or convincing narrative, but ultimately fail because a mere 140 - 280 characters is unfortunately a too limited amount of space in which to properly frame and elucidate ideas in their proper context.

So, what often ends up happening is that those on either side of a divisive issue engage in a series of pithy one-liners, appeals to emotion, short insults and back and forth name-calling, not dissimilar to a junior high school cafeteria food fight.

The main problem with this sort of conflict seems to be a lack of nuance and an incomplete understanding of complex issues from participants on both sides.

To take the most recent protests in Iran as an example...

Last week the hashtags #IranProtests and #FreeIran were both trending on Twitter during the height of the demonstrations, with people in both camps tweeting for or against their respective causes. Lost in this verbal melee was the subtle but complicated understanding that many different perspectives of the various players can be true simultaneously.

As hundreds of thousands of Iranians take to the streets in support of their government and against recent violent demonstrations in the country, the chief commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) reports that the rioting seen in several Iranian cities over the last week is now under control. Claiming that "the Iranian nation has been targeted due to its resistance against the US and its lackeys and for its support for oppressed nations worldwide," Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari also reported that "a large number of the arrested trouble-makers at the center of the sedition had received training from counter-revolutionaries and the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization [MKO/MEK - People's Mujahedin of Iran, aka National Council of Resistance of Iran]."

When President Rouhani spoke with French President Macron yesterday, he urged France to stop hosting the MEK, which has been based in Paris since its leaders fled Iran after the 1979 revolution. Macron didn't acknowledge his country's support for the MEK, but he did call on the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel to cool their aggressive rhetoric. Much as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights spoon-feeds Western media with fake intel about what is going on there, and just as Turkey has to worry about the US-based fifth columnist Gulen network, Iran has to contend with a dodgy expatriate organization that Hillary Clinton got de-listed from the US List of Terror Organizations in 2012.

Undeterred by the sheer fantasy that a 'democratic revolution' could occur in a country that holds regular elections, it's all-systems go for the US media in its effort to 'catapult the propaganda' against the Iranian 'Islamic regime'. Fox News yesterday gave a platform to Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the Washington office of the MEK, in which he urged the Trump government to impose crippling sanctions (additional, presumably, to the existing ones) and to recognize his organization as the new government of Iran.

The heroic story of a righteous underdog fighting for noble ideals against a tyrannical regime has galvanized the US polity - right and left, including some among the ostensibly anti-globalist 'alt-media' - to proclaim their impassioned support for 'the Iranian opposition', whom they portray as democratic white knights against the theocratic despots ruling Iran. But a closer look at the 'better option' certain Westerners have deigned the 'saviors' of Iran reveals quite a different tale.

There are estimated to be over 200 million smartphone addicts worldwide and 46% of Americans say that they can't live without their smartphones. Mobile phones were initially an adjunct to the home phone, useful for emergencies while out on the road, but have morphed into an ever-present source of addiction for children and adults alike. Users check their phones up to 85 times a day, interact more with their phones than they do with other people and live in a state of continuous distraction. Warnings of the dangers of smartphone overuse have fallen on deaf ears as the technology has invaded every aspect of life. Researchers are finding that as we become more dependent on smartphone apps our cognitive capacities weaken considerably and we are left dumbed down, moody and distanced from reality.

Join us on this episode of The Health and Wellness Show where we discuss the dumbness of smartphones (and their owners) and if society can ever turn back after Pandora's smartphone has been unboxed.

Also stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where she discusses the use of a common cooking spice as a solution for dog's itching.

Running Time: 01:20:05

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