Yesterday, Head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov told NTV channel he'd like to quit his post as leader of Chechnya and help the local militias in Novorussia (Donetsk and Lugansk) fight their Ukrainian attackers. This comes after Kiev's corrupt officials initiated criminal proceedings against him last week and threatened to put him on an international 'wanted' list. He responded:

They can keep saying whatever they like. But I am going to ask the (Russian) president for permission to quit my post in order to go to Donbass to protect the interests of those citizens who are fighting there now.

The day after the probable false-flag terror attack in Chechnya's capital city Grozny on December 4, several members of the Ukrainian Rada, including Yuri Beryoza, Andriy Levus and Ihor Moiseychuk voiced their support for the terrorist attack, calling for a "second front" to open in Russia's Caucasus region. One of these fools, Moiseychuk, even implied a wish for Kadyrov's assassination, uploading a video of him shooting an assault rifle at a photograph of Kadyrov.

Religious statutes permit Muslims to take the law in their own hands, kill alleged blasphemers and attack minority communities. In Pakistan, a mere accusation of blasphemy is often enough to put an individual and their community in extreme danger.

Is this only true to Islam or are there similarities at work in other religious systems as well? Let's look at recent events to illustrate the concern:

Blasphemy: Utter-ly a Death's Sentence

a horror story...

Christians beaten to death for allegedly desecrating Qur'an in Pakistan
An angry crowd attacked and killed a Christian couple and then burned their bodies at the brick kiln where they worked. Rumors circulated that the couple had desecrated a Qur'an the day before, although the circumstances of this accusation are not clear [...] the latest example of violence against minorities accused of blasphemy...

and this one is unthinkable...

Girl saw her mother burn alive for blasphemy in Pakistan...and then the mob tried to set HER alight as well
A four-year-old girl and her 18-month-old sister were forced to watch their pregnant Christian mother 'twitch' in the flames when a Muslim mob burnt her and her husband alive after accusing them of blasphemy and were savagely beaten...

and then this crazed old guy...

A 70-year-old Briton suffering from paranoid schizophrenia is facing a death sentence in Pakistan
When Mohammad Asghar claimed to be a prophet sent by God, his psychosis talking, a police officer at the maximum security prison shot him in the back because he had to "kill the blasphemer..."

This week the US Congress finally published its long-awaited 'Torture Report', the culmination of years of investigation into the Bush gang's 'methods' after 9/11.

The US media reported shock and outrage at the committee's findings, but what did we actually learn from their report? And is the truth about what went on - and is still going on - far worse than we're being told?

The Behind the Headlines team investigate...

Running Time: 02:09:00

Download: MP3

This week, we discussed the recent CIA Torture Report, Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted, what we do and don't know about early Christianity, and more.The CIA Torture Report has been a source of much contention in the media and high-up political circles. Listen as we survey the various points of view bandied about: from those who would seek to excuse the criminal and psychopathic methods of the CIA, to others who recognize it as one more attempt to make the American public complicit in its government's machinations.

In the second part of the show, we examine early Christianity: our common historic understanding of who Jesus was and what he did next to the actual facts that much of the Church knows of - and why those facts aren't generally known and understood by those who consider themselves Christian.

Running Time: 01:22:00

Download: MP3

As the holiday season approaches, people the world over will be celebrating the year's end in accordance with their local traditions. In the Netherlands in recent years there has been steadily-growing controversy about its peculiar Christmas tradition involving white people wearing blackface theatrical makeup.

Jon Stewart is right: the U.S. most definitely is NOT a post-racial society. But before we, as Dutch citizens, start lecturing Americans about the state of their nation, we ought to come clean about our own racist proclivities. Every year on December 5th Dutch children celebrate a kind of mini pre-Santa day of gift-giving (well, gift-receiving in the kids' case, but the adult population joins in the fun too). The centerpiece of Sint-Nicolaas Day are parades in every town and city up and down the country, in which the guest of honor is a very Father Christmas-like figure who gives kids candy... with the assistance of 'Black Pete', his negro servant sidekick.

To understand this toxic Dutch 'tradition', you have to understand some of its past. But first, here's the story of "Sint-Nicolaas and Black Pete" as it is presented today.

After his surprise meeting with the French president François Hollande at a Moscow airport, Putin held an unscripted press conference which lasted a little less than six minutes.¹ From the way he smiled when he took the first question, it was clear that, from his point of view, the meeting went extremely well. And it is not difficult to understand why.

Having created a rift among the NATO allies by negotiating a major gas deal with the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Putin believes that he is now able to drive the point home to the warmongering policy-makers in Washington, London and Brussels that major disagreements on policy toward Russia also exist within the European Union. In other words, he sees Hollande's visit as a major crack in the edifice of the EU's punitive actions against Russia.

It is worth pointing out that rumblings of discontent about the sanctions were present in the EU almost from the day one. Not long after the sanctions were imposed as a reaction to the supposed Russian involvement in the shooting down of MH-17, for which, to this day, there is not a shred of credible evidence, the Slovak prime minister Robert Fico warned that the sanctions against Russia might "threaten" the expected positive growth of EU economies.²

It's one thing to have record early cold temperatures and record early snowfalls in both Eurasia and North America. To have the greatest ever snow coverage for the Northern Hemisphere by mid-November is something else. November 2014 was alternately mild and super-freezing as the Polar Jet Stream whip-lashed the North American continent, bringing monster snowstorms that dumped entire annual snowfall averages in many parts of the U.S., not least the city of Buffalo, New York, which was buried under 7 feet (2.25 meters) of snow.

Numerous bright meteor fireballs were caught on camera, including several big ones - probably comet/asteroid fragments - that were seen from huge swathes of the US, Russia, China, Japan and Europe. Buenos Aires was flooded for the second time this year, while record-breaking (in many cases, breaking records set last month) rainfall levels were seen across much of the western Mediterranean, killing many people in Morocco, southeastern France and northwestern Italy.

Sinkholes from China to Florida opened up to swallow people and cars. Brisbane, Australia was literally smashed by baseball-sized hail in a surprise 'super-storm'. The Great Lakes began to refreeze by mid-November, not 4 months after finally thawing from last winter. Japan's largest active volcano erupted, as did Colima Volcano in Mexico, and Pavlof in Alaska, each sending ash plumes several kilometers high, while lava flows from Hawaii's Kilauea and Cape Verde's Fire Island destroyed homes.

Then there were UFOs over Paris and Iran, pods of deepwater whales seeking shallow waters, and tornado outreaks in the Mediterranean... has the world gone mad? These were the 'Signs of the Times' in November 2014:

This week on Behind the Headlines, we're discussing 'pipeline-istan', the economic battle between the West and Russia over who supplies Europe with its energy needs. Putin recently upset the EU by cancelling the planned South Stream Russian natural gas pipeline via Bulgaria... and replacing it with an alternative route to Turkey, which could possibly go from there into Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. While this development came as a surprise to some, it's actually part of a decades-old issue that reappears in different guises: the US considers Europe to be its own, therefore Russian 'invasions', even in the form of peaceful trade deals, must be kept minimal.

Running Time: 02:17:00

Download: MP3

In the first episode of The Truth Perspective, Harrison Koehli and fellow Sott.net editors discussed the breakdown of the South Stream deal between Russia and Europe. This came as a stun to EU leaders, who were expecting to make Russia submit. But Putin turned it around with a strategic move to Turkey.

Then, Chechnya experienced a terror attack, a day before Putin's annual address. Were the events connected in some way? The Truth Perspective looks into it.

Running Time: 01:09:00

Download: MP3

On December 2, the same day that the Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a surprising gas deal during a press conference with the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, the foreign ministers of NATO countries met in Brussels. The main points of their discussion included the working-out of the so-called 'Readiness Action Plan', which concerns the formation of a NATO rapid intervention force by 2016 and the transformation of NATO mission in Afghanistan. A video conference with the newly appointed foreign minister of Ukraine, Pavlo Klimkin, was also conducted.¹