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In the first part of the 70-minute speech, Mr. Putin adopted the angry, aggrieved tone toward the West that he has used since Russia annexed Crimea in March, blaming the United States for starting the trouble by fomenting a coup in Ukraine.

73 terrorist groups operating in Syria have established a new umbrella organization called the 'Syrian Revolution Command Council' in Gaziantep, southern Turkey. While the Syrian Arab Army was taking back the regions controlled by terrorist groups, the terrorists established a new umbrella organization called the 'Syrian Revolution Command Council'. The newly established umbrella organization of Syrian terrorist groups was declared in Turkey's border province to Syria, Gaziantep.   The representatives of the terrorist organizations had gathered in Gaziantep province of Turkey for announcing their new terrorist formation, the Syrian Revolution Command Council.   The new terrorist network lead by a former judge Kais al Sheikh represents 73 different terrorist organizations.   According to Arab media, Ahrar al Sham, which is known to work closely with al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate and the Nusra Front also take place in the new terrorist network of Syria.   According to an American news site, www.mcclatchy.com, the announcement of the new umbrella group comes at a time when moderate rebels have lost territory to the Nusra Front, especially in Idlib province, where groups associated with the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army coalition used to hold sway. "On Friday, as the groups were meeting here, the Nusra Front stormed the bases of two moderate rebel groups in Syria’s north: the Ansar Brigades in Idlib and the Haqq Front in Hama. The two groups, both of which were receiving U.S. support through a covert CIA program, surrendered to Nusra, delivered their weapons to Ahrar al Sham and returned to their homes. Some of the leaders escaped to Turkey, fearing arrest or revenge from Nusra," said mcclatchy in its news on 29 November 2014.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Saturday that relations between Turkey and Greece are no longer impeded by a psychological barrier. "Now they are not only speaking with their tongues but also from their hearts to each other. This is a significant step," Davutoglu said, at a joint press conference with his Greek counterpart Antonis Samaras, following the third meeting of the Turkey-Greek High Level Cooperation Council in Athens. "We are committed to no longer allowing certain taboos or patterns in our minds about the ties between Turkey and Greece, but to open all doors between the two countries in the future," he said.

Davutoglu added that both sides saw the advantages of working together. "For example, our transportation policies in the Aegean Sea will complete each other. We are building the Canakkale Bridge between the two countries, and it will provide the best route from the Greek island of Lesbos to northern Greece," he said. Davutoglu pointed out that Ankara's and Athens' energy policies also complete each other, as the energy corridors of the two countries are being connected through projects like the Trans Anatolia Natural Gas Pipeline, and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline.  TANAP is projected to transport natural gas from the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz 2 field on the Caspian Sea and other Azerbaijani fields, through Turkey to Europe. The Trans Adriatic Pipeline, will connect with TANAP on the east side of the Greek-Turkish border, and will cross to northern Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea to connect with the Italian natural gas network in southern Italy.  

The Greek premier also voiced Athens' support for Turkey's European accession process as his government would find it useful for their neighbor join the European Union.     "Turkey may be certain that it will have huge benefits from its EU accession," Samaras said.

JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM) is paying out a $100 million settlement to keep details about an antitrust lawsuit filed 2 years ago out of the court system and public record.

JPM is one of 12 mega-banks named in the suit while they were particularly named for the price manipulation on foreign exchanges markets using digital communications and social media. Several investors including hedge funds, public pension funds, the Philadelphia city and other market investors filed a complaint accusing 12 banks of manipulating WM/Reuters rates through chat rooms, e-mail and instant messaging since Jan 2003. • JPMorgan  • Bank of America  • Goldman Sachs  • Morgan Stanley  • Citigroup  • UBS  • Credit Suisse  • HSBC • Barclays  • The Royal Bank of Scotland  • BNP  • Deutsche Bank.

According to court documents, “the banks’ manipulation of WM/Reuters rates impacted the value of financial transactions in the U.S., including foreign exchange trade. Further, the plaintiffs claimed that these also negatively affected the pension and savings accounts that are dependent on global foreign exchange rates.”

When the Palestinians sought statehood at the United Nations in 2011, it was widely dismissed as a symbolic gambit to skirt negotiations with Israel and Washington’s influence over the long-running conflict. But the Palestinians have begun to translate a series of such symbolic steps, culminating in last week’s move to join the International Criminal Court, into a strategy that has begun to create pressure on Israel.While many prominent Israelis have called for unilateral action to set the country’s borders, it is Palestinians who have gained political momentum with moves made outside of negotiations. The Palestinians are, in effect, establishing a legal state. International recognition, by 135 countries and counting, is what Palestinians are betting could eventually force changes on the ground — without their leaders having to make the concessions or assurances they have long avoided.

President Abbas, having joined the International Criminal Court after months of rebuffing internal pressure to do so, now faces calls from a frustrated public to go further, by halting security coordination with Israel or dissolving the Palestinian Authority. While both steps would be problematic for the Palestinians as well as the Israelis, Palestinian leaders see it as a way to further squeeze Israel. Without the authority, Israel would have to provide services and maintain order across the West Bank without Palestinian security forces, which would likely be both costly and chaotic, and could intensify international frustration with Israel’s occupation.“I’m a little surprised with the negative American reaction because Palestinians either pursue peaceful legal approaches or pursue violent illegal approaches,” said Ghassan Khatib, vice president of Birzeit University in the West Bank. “But if all the doors are closed, and if the Israelis and the Americans will stop funding, then the P.A. will collapse, and that will play to the hands of the extreme elements in Palestinian society, including Hamas.”

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority seems undeterred and increasingly indifferent to American diplomacy. He vowed Sunday to resubmit a Security Council resolution that failed last week “again and again” and to “join 100, 200, 300” international organizations, despite the risk that Israeli and American sanctions could lead to his government’s collapse.

The Russian Government’s Tass ‘news’ agency is alleging that “The US private military company Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) … has confirmed to the Kiev authorities its readiness to start training an experimental battalion of 550 men as of January at the request of Ukraine’s General Staff,” according to an unnamed source, which source is probably one of the few remaining anti-nazi bureaucrats still remaining in the Ukrainian Government. The reported price of this Blackwater (a.k.a. “Xe,” a.k.a. “Academi”) training contract is $3.5 million. Furthermore, “‘Ukraine has said it is ready to pay the money on the condition of assistance from the Ukrainian association Patriot, providing technical and financial support for the project,’ the source said.” That organization is Patriot of Ukraine. If this report in Tass is true, then the Ukrainian Government, which now is being funded almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers (inasmuch as it no longer meets the financial requirements of the IMF and EU, both of which receive funding from both U.S. and European taxpayers), and for which the U.S. Congress just passed and the U.S. President just signed into law in December authorization of a $450 million donation, is now co-funding this military training, along with — as wikipedia describes “Patriot of Ukraine” (but with wikipedia’s footnotes removed) —

a Ukrainian nationalist organization with racist and neo-Nazi political beliefs. It constitutes a paramilitary wing of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (S.N.A.), an assemblage of neo-Nazi organizations and groups founded in 2008 that share the social-national ideology and agree upon building a social-national state in Ukraine. Both the “Patriot of Ukraine” and the S.N.A. engage in political violence against minorities and their political opponents. The leader of the “Patriot of Ukraine” and of the Social-National Assembly is Andriy Biletsky. The S.N.A. derived from “the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine,” whose name was derived from the National Socialist Party of Germany — the original Nazis. America’s CIA hides its longstanding support of nazis after World War II (see this and this), but the Bushes and Obama have continued it even decades after the Soviet Union and its communism ended. Consequently, in 2004, the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine was advised by the CIA to, and it did, change its name to the “Freedom Party,” or “Svoboda,” because that sounds better to Americans.

The CIA recently admitted after more than 60 years that they were responsible for Iran’s coup in 1953. The following illustrated guide, which ran in Slate in 2012, tells the story of Syria’s coup, which occurred four years before Iran’s. This change of power set in motion decades of political turmoil that have led to Bashar al-Assad’s position as the current leader of the Syrian regime. The Obama administration is threatening military action against Assad after Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons, so here’s a look back at what was possibly the United States’ last attempt at regime change in Syria.

You may recall, from the dark days of Abu Ghraib, that there was a batch of photos that was never released—images the Pentagon deemed so inflammatory that they needed to stay under wraps. The ones we saw were disturbing enough: the piles of naked Iraqi prisoners, the soldier giving a thumbs up next to an ice-packed corpse, the prisoners being menaced by dogs. And who can forget that iconic shot of a hooded man (his name is Ali Shalil Qaissi), standing on a box in a shower with wires attached to his fingers—a mock execution. There are as many as 2,100 additional images, according to the ACLU, which sued the government in 2004 demanding their release. President Obama has resisted the legal efforts, noting in a statement that to make the photos public would "impact the safety of our troops." Newsweek's Lauren Walker nicely summarizes the developments so far, some of which my colleague Nick Baumann has also covered, so here's the upshot: In August, a federal judge gave the administration an ultimatum: either release the photos or provide evidence for each image explaining why publishing it would be detrimental to national security. On December 19, the administration indicated that it would take the latter course, and a hearing on the new evidence has been set for January 20.

Because the concealed images, the ACLU told Newsweek, aren't simply more examples of abuse: "One of the reasons we’ve been fighting for so long for these photographs is because the official narrative following the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib photos was that those abuses were the result of a few bad apples," says Alex Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney working on the case since 2005. "These photographs come from at least seven different detention facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq.... We think this would once and for all end the myth that the abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib was an aberration," he says. "It was essentially official policy. It was widespread at different facilities under different commanders."

Consider this exchange between Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo and former Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, who got an eight-year prison sentence for his role in the Abu Ghraib horrorshow. (He was the guy who staged the mock execution.) The interview is from Zimbardo's 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect, which is about how good people placed in bad situations end up doing abhorrent things.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t oppose Greece leaving the eurozone. Talks about the possibility of Greece leaving the eurozone have gained renewed urgency after 30.4 % of polled Greeks said they would vote for Syriza, suggesting a chance that the left-wing party that runs on a platform of renegotiating bailout terms and national sovereignty as well as social justice could win the Greek snap parliamentary elections on January 25.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, that Germany wouldn’t oppose a Greek exit from the eurozone if the people of Greece voted a party to power that opposes the current austerity measures in the country which came as conditionalities along with a EU and IMF bailout. Both Chancellor Merkel as well as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble reportedly believe that such a decision and development would be bearable for Germany as well as for the other eurozone member States. The Chancellor and the Finance Minister were cited as referring to progress made in the eurozone since 2012.

EUropean shares and bonds dropped last week after the Greek parliament rejected the current Prime Minister Antonius Samaras’ presidential candidate and set the country on a course towards snap parliamentary elections on January 25. A recent poll showed that the governing PASOK and New Democracy coalition had suffered substantial losses in popular support after they agreed to the EU/IMF bailout and associated conditions that have driven a large percentage of the middle class into abject poverty. Another issue that is hotly debated among Greeks is the loss of sovereignty over the county’s economic and fiscal policy, and domestic affairs, including social policies.

What has one of the most democratic countries of the Middle East, Syria, done to tick off some of its neighbors in the West, the fierce fighters for democracy? The irrationality and unscrupulousness of the approaches Western countries have taken to the Syrian crisis, when the same people who in Europe are considered terrorists are declared «freedom fighters» when it comes to Syria, becomes clearer in light of the economic dimension of the Syrian tragedy. There is every reason to think that by helping destroy its own cultural and historical roots in Syria, Europe is first and foremost fighting for energy resources. And a special role is played by natural gas, which is emerging as the main fuel of the 21st century. The geopolitical problems connected with its production, transportation and use are perhaps more than any other topic on the radar of Western strategists. 

Wal-Mart Stores Inc plans to improve opportunities for its employees so that in the future there will no longer be a few thousand workers on its payroll making minimum wage, the chief executive of the world's top retailer said on Wednesday. The act of upgrading minimum wage positions would be largely a symbolic move for Wal-Mart. Currently only about 6,000 workers make the minimum out of its U.S. workforce of 1.3 million. Wal-Mart says its average full-time hourly wage is $12.92, compared with the federal minimum wage of $7.25. But the comments from CEO Douglas McMillon could draw some attention amid the contentious national debate over proposals to raise the minimum wage. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the U.S. and a prime target of labor activists who say it doesn't pay workers a living wage.

"We only have a few thousand associates in the U.S., less than 6,000 of our 1.3 million associates in the U.S., that currently make a minimum wage and it is our intention over time that we will be in a situation where we don't pay minimum wage at all," McMillon told reporters on Wednesday when asked about the issue following an investor conference. McMillon said the move would be part of a larger effort to "invest in its associate base". It could also look at using promotions and bonus payments to improve opportunities for workers, he said. He didn't disclose further details. OUR Walmart, a workers' group that's been pushing for the retailer to pay higher wages, is organizing two rallies on Thursday - one in New York and one in Washington D.C. - to put a spotlight on the issue, a spokeswoman for the group said.

The U.S. Senate postponed a vote late Friday on a massive government spending package to fund most of the U.S. government through September 2015.  The lawmakers are expected to vote on the $1.1 trillion spending bill Monday.   The Senate is expected to pass a stop-gap bill Saturday to temporarily extend government funding through next Wednesday.

The United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba and open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century after the release of an American contractor held in prison for five years, President Obama announced on Wednesday.In a deal negotiated during 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis, who hosted a final meeting at the Vatican, Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba agreed in a telephone call to put aside decades of hostility to find a new relationship between the United States and the island nation just 90 miles off the American coast.

Officials said they would re-establish an embassy in Havana and carry out high-level exchanges and visits between the two governments within months. Mr. Obama will send an assistant secretary of state to Havana next month to lead an American delegation to the next round of talks on Cuban-American migration. The United States will also begin working with Cuba on issues like counternarcotics, environmental protection and human trafficking.The United States will also ease travel restrictions across all 12 categories currently envisioned under limited circumstances in American law, including family visits, official visits, journalistic, professional, educational and religious activities, and public performances, officials said. Ordinary tourism, however, will remain prohibited.Continue reading the main story Mr. Obama will also allow greater banking ties and raise the level of remittances allowed to be sent to Cuban nationals to $2,000 every three months from the current limit of $500. Intermediaries forwarding remittances will no longer require a specific license from the government. American travelers will also be allowed to import up to $400 worth of goods from Cuba, including up to $100 in tobacco and alcohol products.

The contractor, Alan P. Gross, traveled on an American government plane to the United States late Wednesday morning, and the United States sent back three Cuban spies who had been in an American prison since 2001. American officials said the Cuban spies were swapped for a United States intelligence agent who had been in a Cuban prison for nearly 20 years, and said Mr. Gross was not technically part of the swap, but was released separately on “humanitarian grounds.”In addition, the United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking relations, and Cuba will release 53 Cuban prisoners identified as political prisoners by the United States government. Although the decades-old American embargo on Cuba will remain in place for now, the president called for an “honest and serious debate about lifting” it.“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s time for a new approach.”

(Reuters) - The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas should be removed from the European Union's terrorist list, an EU court ruled on Wednesday, saying the decision to include it was based on media reports not considered analysis. However, in its ruling, the bloc's second highest tribunal said member states could maintain their freeze on Hamas's assets for three months to give time for further review or for an appeal to be launched.The EU's foreign policy arm said the bloc continued to view Hamas as a terrorist group. "This was a legal ruling of the court based on procedural grounds. We will look into this and decide on appropriate remedial action," spokeswoman Maja Kocijanic said.Israel, which has clashed repeatedly with Europe in recent years over Palestinian statehood ambitions, demanded Hamas remain blacklisted and said the ruling showed "staggering hypocrisy" toward a Jewish state founded after the Holocaust.

Hamas says it is a legitimate resistance movement and contested the European Union's decision in 2001 to include it on the terrorist list. It welcomed Wednesday's verdict."The decision is a correction of a historical mistake the European Union had made," Deputy Hamas chief Moussa Abu Marzouk said. "Hamas is a resistance movement and it has a natural right according to all international laws and standards to resist the occupation."The EU court did not ponder the merits of whether Hamas should be classified as a terror group, but reviewed the original decision-making process. This, it said, did not include the considered opinion of competent authorities, but rather relied on media and Internet reports.

Judge James Pohl, an Army colonel, ruled in July that no conflict of interest arose for defense attorneys from the FBI approaching a security officer for a defense team. The allegations surfaced in April, further delaying a complex, slow-moving case. Lawyers for accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspects want Pohl to determine the extent of FBI contact with defense team members.Mohammed and fellow Sept. 11 suspect Ramzi Binalshibh were among prisoners who underwent torture by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released on Tuesday.

The report on the CIA interrogation program implemented after the Sept. 11 attacks said Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, or simulated drowning, "rectal hydration" and sleep deprivation.

The defendants face possible death penalties if convicted.

The respective governments of China and Russia are seriously considering the idea of building a high-speed railway line between their two capital cities, according to reports.The Beijing Times said that the line, which would be over 7,000 kilometres but cutting the Trans-Siberian railway journey from six days to two, would cost in excess of $230bn (£142.9bn, €179.5bn) if it is to connect Moscow and Beijing via a high-speed railway line.If it were to be completed, it would be triple the length of the world's longest high-speed line which runs from Beijing to Guangzhou.Wang Meng-shu, a tunnel and railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told the Beijing Times: "If the funds are raised smoothly... the line can be completed in five years at the quickest."Vladmir Putin and Premier Li Keqiang signed a memorandum of understanding when China's head of government travelled to Moscow earlier in the week, with the duo outlining their interested in building a high-speed link between Moscow and Kazan in the Tatarstan region, an area which holds vast amount of oil, China Central Television (CCTV) reported.

It was reported earlier in the year that China was considering building a 13,000km high-speed railway line that would run from Beijing to east coast US.The line, creatively dubbed the China-Russia-Canada-America line, would begin in Beijing, travel north through Siberia, and under the Bering Strait to Alaska before heading south through Canada to reach its final - unspecified - destination in the United States.

In a rare episode, US meddling has broken the surface recently with complaints across NED’s network of faux human rights advocates and the Western media over the arrest of Nguyen Dinh NgocFirst appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/03/washington-s-quiet-proxy-war-against-vietnam/

Christopher Stevens arrived in Benghazi, Libya as the US Special Representative to the National Transitional Council, in April, 2011, wielding a program of death and destruction.  

China will start swaps and forwards between the yuan and the national currencies of Russia, Malaysia and New Zealand on December 29, the China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) reported Friday. Earlier in December, China's Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng claimed that China could increase the usage of yuan in trade with Russia amid the ruble's depreciation, which falls in line with China's intention to increase the usage of national currencies in international payments in order to weaken the US dollar's dominance in global finance and promote the yuan as an alternative.

In October, the Russian Central Bank and the People's Bank of China reached a three-year agreement on currency swaps worth 150 billion yuan (over $24 billion). Both the Russian and the Chinese leaders have repeatedly praised the decision, saying it would bring positive effects for the countries' economies and currencies. The main benefits of mutual payments in national currencies are the absence of charges for the conversion of the currencies, direct payments and higher transparency in relations between the banks.

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients. While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,”  is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.

The reports, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, offer few revelations, but contain accounts of internal behavior embarrassing to the agency. In one instance an NSA employee “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting”, a practice which previous reports have indicated was common enough to warrant the name “LOVEINT”. Many of the reports appear to deal with instances of human error rather than malicious misuse of agency resources. Nonetheless, many of these errors are potentially serious, including entries suggesting that unminimized U.S. telephone numbers were mistakenly disseminated to unauthorized parties and that military personnel were given unauthorized access to raw traffic databases collected under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act.

There are also accounts of simple bumbling by NSA employees, including the apparently common mistake of targeting their own communications for surveillance. In one unintentionally amusing passage, an NSA analyst is said to have “targeted his personal cellphone,” because he “mistakenly thought it would be acceptable to [redacted].” Another common example is the practice of NSA analysts accidentally designating their own communications as being those of a foreign intelligence target.