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Power asserted that the most likely culprits behind the downing of MH17 were eastern Ukrainian separatists. Because of the high altitude MH17 was travelling at – approximately 33,000 feet – Power conceded that the weapons separatists have been using to down Ukrainian military aircraft would have been inadequate to down MH17. After claiming separatists had “bragged” about downing the airliner based on information from “social media,” she explained that Russia most likely assisted the separatists in operating the sophisticated anti-air missile systems required to reach MH17′s altitude. Power gives no explanation as to why after multiple successful downings of Ukrainian military aircraft with man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), Russia and the separatists decided to employ larger, more complex weapon systems that would link any incident directly back to Moscow. Power also failed to explain how in one breath she suggests the separatists shot down MH17, then in the next claimed they did not have the ability to do so, and that Russia instead “assisted.”

Power appears to be suggesting Russia rolled self-propelled anti-air missile systems into Ukrainian territory and assisted separatists in firing at MH17 specifically – since all other incidents of separatists shooting down aircraft involved man-portable systems incapable of hitting MH17.

Strategically, politically, and even tactically, Russia and the separatists gained nothing by employing the larger Buk systems within Ukrainian territory as Power is suggesting. Where the World Sees Tragedy, NATO Sees a “Game Changing” Opportunity  Power’s comments and conclusions were echoes from the halls of the West’s corporate-financier funded policy think-tanks. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in a statement titled, “The Downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17: Russia in the Dock,” provides a self-incriminating indictment as to the motives Kiev and its NATO backers had in carrying out the attack on MH17 and subsequently framing Russia for it. RUSI’s statement claims: A Game Change: Within days, however, the real debate will shift from one about producing the right evidence and culprits, to more about what can be saved from the rapidly-deteriorating relations between Russia and the West.

OPERATION: Fax Big Brother Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they'll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of "cybersecurity." CISA won't stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology. So this week we're sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand. Stop CISA. Send a fax now!

(Any tweet w/ #faxbigbrother will get faxed too!) Your email is only shown in your fax to Congress. We won't add you to any mailing lists.

CISA: the dirty deal between government and corporate giants. It's the dirty deal that lets much of government from the NSA to local police get your private data from your favorite websites and lets them use it without due process. The government is proposing a massive bribe—they will give corporations immunity for breaking virtually any law if they do so while providing the NSA, DHS, DEA, and local police surveillance access to everyone's data in exchange for getting away with crimes, like fraud, money laundering, or illegal wiretapping. Specifically it incentivizes companies to automatically and simultaneously transfer your data to the DHS, NSA, FBI, and local police with all of your personally-indentifying information by giving companies legal immunity (notwithstanding any law), and on top of that, you can't use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what has been shared.

Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations rocked the world.  According to his detailed reports, the US had launched massive spying programs and was scrutinizing the communications of American citizens in a manner which could only be described as extreme and intense. The US’s reaction was swift and to the point. “”Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama said when asked about the NSA. As quoted in The Guardian,  Obama went on to say that surveillance programs were “fully overseen not just by Congress but by the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them”. However, it appears that Snowden may have missed a pivotal part of the US surveillance program. And in stating that the “nobody” is not listening to our calls, President Obama may have been fudging quite a bit.

In fact, Great Britain maintains a “listening post” at NSA HQ. The laws restricting live wiretaps do not apply to foreign countries  and thus this listening post  is not subject to  US law.  In other words, the restrictions upon wiretaps, etc. do not apply to the British listening post.  So when Great Britain hands over the recordings to the NSA, technically speaking, a law is not being broken and technically speaking, the US is not eavesdropping on our each and every call. It is Great Britain which is doing the eavesdropping and turning over these records to US intelligence. According to John Loftus, formerly an attorney with  the Department of Justice and author of a number of books concerning US intelligence activities, back in the late seventies  the USDOJ issued a memorandum proposing an amendment to FISA. Loftus, who recalls seeing  the memo, stated in conversation this week that the DOJ proposed inserting the words “by the NSA” into the FISA law  so the scope of the law would only restrict surveillance by the NSA, not by the British.  Any subsequent sharing of the data culled through the listening posts was strictly outside the arena of FISA. Obama was less than forthcoming when he insisted that “What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not.”

According to Loftus, the NSA is indeed listening as Great Britain is turning over the surveillance records en masse to that agency. Loftus states that the arrangement is reciprocal, with the US maintaining a parallel listening post in Great Britain. In an interview this past week, Loftus told this reporter that  he believes that Snowden simply did not know about the arrangement between Britain and the US. As a contractor, said Loftus, Snowden would not have had access to this information and thus his detailed reports on the extent of US spying, including such programs as XKeyscore, which analyzes internet data based on global demographics, and PRISM, under which the telecommunications companies, such as Google, Facebook, et al, are mandated to collect our communications, missed the critical issue of the FISA loophole.

Ellen H. Brown (WoD) : On December 11, 2014, the US House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses. The bill was vigorously challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren; but the tide turned when Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, stepped into the ring. Perhaps what prompted his intervention was the unanticipated $40 drop in the price of oil. As financial blogger Michael Snyder points out, that drop could trigger a derivatives payout that could bankrupt the biggest banks. And if the G20’s new “bail-in” rules are formalized, depositors and pensioners could be on the hook. The new bail-in rules were discussed in my last last article entitled “New G20 Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Hit Depositors AND Pensioners.” They are edicts of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an unelected body of central bankers and finance ministers headquartered in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Where did the FSB get these sweeping powers, and is its mandate legally enforceable?

Those questions were addressed in an article I wrote in June 2009, two months after the FSB was formed, titled “Big Brother in Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty.” It linked the strange boot shape of the BIS to a line from Orwell’s 1984: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” The concerns raised there seem to be materializing, so I’m republishing the bulk of that article here. We need to be paying attention, lest the bail-in juggernaut steamroll over us unchallenged. The Shadowy Financial Stability Board Alarm bells went off in April 2009, when the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) was linked to the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) signed onto by the G20 leaders in London. The FSB was an expansion of the older Financial Stability Forum (FSF) set up in 1999 to serve in a merely advisory capacity by the G7 (a group of finance ministers formed from the seven major industrialized nations). The chair of the FSF was the General Manager of the BIS. The new FSB was expanded to include all G20 members (19 nations plus the EU).

Formally called the “Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors,” the G20 was, like the G7, originally set up as a forum merely for cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system. What set off alarms was that the new Financial Stability Board had real teeth, imposing “obligations” and “commitments” on its members; and this feat was pulled off without legislative formalities, skirting the usual exacting requirements for treaties. It was all done in hasty response to an “emergency.” Problem-reaction-solution was the slippery slope of coups. Buried on page 83 of an 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the US Obama administration was a recommendation that the FSB strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. It sounded like a worthy goal, but there was a disturbing lack of detail. What was the FSB’s mandate, what were its expanded powers, and who was in charge? An article in The London Guardian addressed those issues in question and answer format:

If you talk about legacy systems and then a breakaway civilization, the legacy systems were financed with debt and if the resources have basically been shifted out and over into "NewCo" then that's going to be an equity model. We're literally coming into what I consider to be a planetary debt for equity swap. So the question for all of us is how do we navigate the turn? When do you leave the bond market and when does the equity increase occur? We've seen North America equity markets rising and the emerging markets falling this year.

Britain’s domestic intelligence chief has demanded greater authority for spies to help fight the threat of Islamist extremism, a sign that the attack on a satirical newspaper in Paris is likely to sharpen the security-versus-privacy debate in Western countries.Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, said militants were planning attacks in Britain similar to the one that killed 12 people at the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo.

Amid a backlash against digital surveillance after disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden in 2013, Mr. Parker said there was a growing imbalance between the number of terrorist plots against Britain and the ability of spies to track their communications. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Charlie Hebdo Suspects Dead in Raid; Hostage Taker in Paris Is Also KilledJAN. 9, 2015 Why Reams of Intelligence Did Not Thwart the Paris AttacksJAN. 9, 2015 Speaking at MI5 headquarters late on Thursday, he warned against an atmosphere in which privacy was “so absolute and sacrosanct that terrorists and others who mean us harm can confidently operate from behind those walls without fear of detection.”

“If we are to do our job, MI5 will continue to need to be able to penetrate their communications as we have always done,” he said. “That means having the right tools, legal powers and the assistance of companies which hold relevant data.”“Currently,” he added, “this picture is patchy.”

NATO has announced that it is launching an “information war” against Russia. The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation. It’s well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion. Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies. Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See this, this, this, this and this. In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there’s even less to constrain propaganda than before.

Information warfare for propaganda purposes also includes: The Pentagon, Federal Reserve and other government entities using software to track discussion of political issues … to try to nip dissent in the bud before it goes viral “Controlling, infiltrating, manipulating and warping” online discourse Use of artificial intelligence programs to try to predict how people will react to propaganda

Some of the propaganda is spread by software programs. We pointed out 6 years ago that people were writing scripts to censor hard-hitting information from social media. One of America’s top cyber-propagandists – former high-level military information officer Joel Harding – wrote in December: I was in a discussion today about information being used in social media as a possible weapon.  The people I was talking with have a tool which scrapes social media sites, gauges their sentiment and gives the user the opportunity to automatically generate a persuasive response. Their tool is called a “Social Networking Influence Engine”. *** The implications seem to be profound for the information environment. *** The people who own this tool are in the civilian world and don’t even remotely touch the defense sector, so getting approval from the US Department of State might not even occur to them.

The US has attempted to direct attention away from the fact supposed “moderate rebels” it has been supporting are now openly aligned to designated foreign terrorist organizations including Al Qaeda, Jabhat Al Nusra, and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) by focusing instead on the alleged “humanitarian crisis” unfolding amid final operations to restore security to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Reuters in an article titled, “Russia urges U.S. to deliver on promise to separate Syria’s moderates from ‘terrorists’,” would admit: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday to make good on U.S. pledges to separate Washington-oriented units of Syrian opposition from “terrorist groups”, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. In response, Washington has incoherently and dishonestly blamed Russia for what it calls the driving of moderates into the arms of terrorist organizations.

However, in reality, a long-standing truth entirely negates America’s current rhetoric – so thoroughly that this reality lays the blame for the last five years of regional catastrophe entirely at Washington’s feet.

Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says the company will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services. “We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik,” Schmidt said during a Q & A session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada on Saturday, when asked about whether Google facilitates “Russian propaganda.”

“We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.”The discussion focused on the company’s popular Google News service, which clusters the news by stories, then ranks the various media outlets depending on their reach, article length and veracity, and Google Alerts, which proactively informs subscribers of new publications.

The Alphabet chief, who has been referred to by Hillary Clinton as a “longtime friend,” added that the experience of “the last year” showed that audiences could not be trusted to distinguish fake and real news for themselves.“We started with the default American view that ‘bad’ speech would be replaced with ‘good’ speech, but the problem found in the last year is that this may not be true in certain situations, especially when you have a well-funded opponent who is trying to actively spread this information,” he told the audience.

In defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata—numbers dialed, lengths of calls. "There are no names, there’s no content in that database," President Barack Obama told Charlie Rose in June. No names; just metadata. New research from Stanford demonstrates the silliness of that distinction. Armed with very sparse metadata, Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler found it easy—trivially so—to figure out the identity of a caller. <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drebecca-j-rosen%26title%3Dstanford-researchers-it-is-trivially-easy-to-match-metadata-to-real-people%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x185&c=387748957&tile=3" title=""><img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drebecca-j-rosen%26title%3Dstanford-researchers-it-is-trivially-easy-to-match-metadata-to-real-people%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x185&c=387748957&tile=3" alt="" /></a></div> Mayer and Mutchler are running an experiment which works with volunteers who agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone, that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Now, using that data, Mayer and Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble at all to figure out who the phone numbers belonged to, and they did it in just a few hours.

They write: We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from our crowdsourced MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684 (13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook. What about if an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources, we were up to 73. How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100 numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74 matched.1 Between Intelius, Google search, and our three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100 numbers.

Their results weren't perfect (and they note that the Intelius data was particularly spotty), but they didn't even try all that hard. "If a few academic researchers can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of American phone numbers," they conclude. It's also difficult to believe they wouldn't try. As federal district judge Richard Leon wrote in his decision last week, "There is also nothing stopping the Government from skipping the [National Security Letter] step altogether and using public databases or any of its other vast resources to match phone numbers with subscribers."

What is really behind the deep-state infighting over the U.S. elections and the "wire tapping" of the Trump campaign? Why was the CIA-Neocon axis vehemently lobbying against Trump? What foreign interests and what money is involved in this? Answers to these questions are now emerging. The former director of the CIA under Clinton, James Woolsey, went to the Wall Street Journal and offered some information (likely some true and some false) on the retired General Flynn and the lobbying businesses he was involved in. Woolsey is an arch-neoconservative. He had worked on the transition team of Trump but got fired over "growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies." Flynn is the former National Security Advisor of Trump who later also got fired. Woolsey was a board member of Flynn's former lobbying company FIG. Woolsey claims: In September 2016 he took part in a meeting between Flynn and high level Turkish officials, including the Turkish foreign minister and the energy minister who is the son-in-law of the Turkish president Erdogan. During the meeting, Woolsey claims, a brainstorming took place over how the Turkish cult leader Fethullah Gülen could -probably by illegal means- be removed from the U.S. and handed over to Turkey. Gülen is accused by the Erdogan mafia of initiating a coup attempt against it. The U.S. claims officially that there is no evidence for such an accusation and that Gülen can therefore not be rendered to Turkey. Gülen is an old CIA asset that helped the U.S. deep state to control Turkey.  Erdogan divorced from the Gülen organization after it became useless for his neo-Ottoman project. Here is the WSJ report on the Woolsey claims and a video clip with parts of his WSJ interview. Woolsey also went on CNN where he repeated his WSJ story. Flynn was accused by the anti-Trump campaign to have worked for Russia. He had taken several $10,000 for speeches he gave in Moscow. He also, at times, had argued for better U.S. relations with Russia. But Flynn's pro-Russia stand was probably honest. (Or the bribes involved were just smaller than the ones paid by others.) The money he got on the speaker circus was rather small for a man in his position. Flynn's real corruption was on another issue. After having been fired from the Trump administration, Flynn retroactively filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). His lobbying firm had a contract over $530,000 to work for a company near to the Turkish president Erdogan: In its filing, Mr. Flynn’s firm said its work from August to November “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” The filing said his firm’s fee, $530,000, wasn’t paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.

This lobbying, not the alleged Flynn-Putin relation, is the real scandal and part of the Trump/CIA/Clinton deep-state in-fighting. The meeting Woolsey described was under the "Turkish" Flynn contract. The Turkish business man, and owner of Inovo, Ekim Alptekin is a member of the Erdogan gang. But hidden at the very end of the WSJ story is the real key to understand the shady network: Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments. It was the Israeli gas company, not the Alptekin outlet, that drove the issue. The Leviatan (and Tamar) gas fields in the Mediterranean along the Israeli coast are a huge energy and profit resource IF the gas from them can be exported to Europe. Several companies are involved in the exploration and all are looking for ways to connect the fields to the European gas network. There are (likely true) rumors that huge bribes have been payed in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere to win exploration contracts and to sell the gas. Negotiations between Israel and Turkey over the pipeline have been on and off. They depend on a positive climate towards Israel in the Turkish government which again depends on the often changing political position of the Erdogan gang.

The picture evolving here (lots of sleuthing and sources) is this: An Israeli company (or whoever is behind it) wants a gas pipeline to Turkey. It hires Flynn and Alptekin to arrange a positive climate for the Leviathan pipeline within the Turkish government. It offers Flynn more than half a million for a little (4-month long) influence work. His job is to create a "friendly atmosphere" for the deal by using his influence in the U.S. to accommodate Erdogan. A major point that is expected from Flynn is to arrange the handover of Gülen, by whatever means, from the U.S. to Erdogan. After accepting the (lobbying) bribe Flynn-the-whore suddenly changes his former anti-Turkish, pro-Russian, pro-Kurdish political position into a pro-Turkish, neutral-Russian and anti-Kurdish one. (His lobbying firm also makes some smaller payments related to the Clinton email-server scandal. This may be related to links between the Clinton family and the Gülen school empire.) He has a meeting with the Turkish government/Erdogan officials part of which is a discussion of a removal of Gülen to Turkey. He pens a pro Erdogan anti-Gülen op-ed which is published on the day of the election and he denigrates the Pentagon plan to work with the Kurds in Syria. The NSA, CIA and the FBI are listening to Flynn's conversations with Turkish and Israeli interests. (For the old and long history of such "wiretapping" of Turkish and Israeli connections and various dirty and criminal deals they revealed read and ask Sibel Edmonds.) The projects which Flynn is involved in, especially removing Gülen, are against the long term interests of the (neoconservative-driven) CIA. Selected tapes of his talks are transcribed and distributed within the anti-Trump campaign. This is the origin of the "wiretapping" of the Trump Tower the U.S. president lamented about. The stuff the CIA dug up about Flynn's dealing was and is used against Trump. Woolsey is caught up in this as he also worked for Flynn's lobbying firm. (His neocon-pro-Zionist history suggests that he is the senior Israeli watchdog over Flynn in all this.) He is now engaged in damage control and is "coming clean" and selectively leaking his anti-Flynn stuff to exculpate himself. (There is probably also some new, better deal involved that will pay off from him.) The Israeli-Turkish pipeline and the related deep-state fight are not the only issue involved in the campaign against Trump. There are also British interests and British intelligence involvement especially with the accusations against Russia of "hacking" of the DNC. If and how these fit in with above has not yet been revealed.

With Donald J. Trump about to take control of the White House, it would seem a dark time for the renewable energy industry. After all, Mr. Trump has mocked the science of global warming as a Chinese hoax, threatened to kill a global deal on climate change and promised to restore the coal industry to its former glory.

We do not know for sure that the New York wind farm will get built, but we do know this: The energy transition is real, and Mr. Trump is not going to stop it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story On a global scale, more than half the investment in new electricity generation is going into renewable energy. That is more than $300 billion a year, a sign of how powerful the momentum has become.Wind power is booming in the United States, with the industry adding manufacturing jobs in the reddest states. When Mr. Trump’s appointees examine the facts, they will learn that wind-farm technician is projected to be the fastest-growing occupation in America over the next decade.The election of Mr. Trump left climate activists and environmental groups in despair. They had pinned their hopes on a Hillary Clinton victory and a continuation of President Obama’s strong push to tackle global warming.

Now, of course, everything is in flux. In the worst case, with a sufficiently pliant Congress, Mr. Trump could roll back a decade of progress on climate change. Barring some miraculous conversion on Mr. Trump’s part, his election cannot be interpreted as anything but bad news for the climate agenda.Yet despair might be an overreaction.For starters, when Mr. Trump gets to the White House, he will find that the federal government actually has relatively little control over American energy policy, and particularly over electricity generation. The coal industry has been ravaged in part by cheap natural gas, which is abundant because of technological changes in the way it is produced, and there is no lever in the Oval Office that Mr. Trump can pull to reverse that.The intrinsically weak federal role was a source of frustration for Mr. Obama and his aides, but now it will work to the benefit of environmental advocates. They have already persuaded more than half the states to adopt mandates on renewable energy. Efforts to roll those back have largely failed, with the latest development coming only last week, when Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, vetoed a rollback bill.

The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause. This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago. The difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change. 

In an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times titled “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,” Muller writes: “Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

Muller’s New York Times commentary follows research he did last year that confirmed the work of scientists who found the Earth’s temperature was rising. In the past, Muller had criticized which global temperatures were used in such research, contending that some monitoring stations provided inaccurate data.  Now, Berkeley’s research has weighed in on the causes of the temperature rise, testing arguments climate contrarians have used. “What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees?” Muller writes. “We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.”

eOnline reports: A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information, just by looking at you and scanning your face with their Google Glass. The app is called NameTag and it sounds CREEPY. The “real-time facial recognition” software “can detect a face using the Google Glass camera, send it wirelessly to a server, compare it to millions of records, and in seconds return a match complete with a name, additional photos and social media profiles.” The information listed could include your name, occupation, any social media profiles you have set up and whether or not you have a criminal record (“CRIMINAL HISTORY FOUND” pops up in bright red letters according to the demo).

Since the NSA is tapping into all of our digital communications, it is not unreasonable to assume that all of the info from your digital glasses – yup, everything – may be recorded by the spy agency. Are we going to have millions of mini NSAs walking around recording everything … glassholes? It doesn’t help inspire confidence that America’s largest police force and Taser are beta-testing Google Glasses. Postscript: I love gadgets and tech, and previously discussed the exciting possibilities of Google Glasses. But the NSA is ruining the fun, just like it’s harming U.S. Internet business.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) secretly monitored 60 million phone calls in Spain in one month, Spanish media say. The reports say the latest allegations came from documents provided by the fugitive US analyst Edward Snowden. They say the NSA collected the numbers and locations of the callers and the recipients, but not the calls' content. This comes as an EU parliamentary delegation is due to meet officials in Washington to convey concerns.

Meanwhile, a Japanese news agency says the NSA asked the Japanese government in 2011 to help it monitor fibre-optic cables carrying personal data through Japan, to the Asia-Pacific region. The reports, carried by the Kyodo news agency, say that this was intended to allow the US to spy on China - but Japan refused, citing legal restrictions and a shortage of personnel. The White House has so far declined to comment on Monday's claims about US spying in Spain, published in the newspapers El Pais and El Mundo.

Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Friday that the NSA had monitored the phones of 35 world leaders. Again Mr Snowden was the source of the report. The head of the European Parliament's delegation, British MEP Claude Moraes, told the BBC it was the scale of the NSA's alleged surveillance that was worrying. "The headline news, that 35 leaders had their phones tapped, is not the real crux of the issue," he said. "It really is the El Mundo type story, that millions of citizens of countries... had their landlines and other communications tapped. So it's about mass surveillance. It's about scale and proportionality."

A recent article written by this writer for Global Research posted last Saturday – “The Benghazi Scandal Is Obama’s Watergate But Worse” – was written in an effort to seek and uncover the truth. Accurate reporting on major world events is a challenge in today’s world where propaganda and disinformation are mainstream media norms and where virtually all major players in American politics simply lie through their teeth every time they open their mouths in constant effort to look good and cover up the truth. The American public knows this pathetic and sobering fact that deception has come to rule in the world of both politics and the media. People today neither believe their newscasters nor their political leaders. That is why examining the content of the tidal wave of assertions and opinions spewing forth from politicians and pundits in the aftermath of the latest Benghazi revelations must be taken with a grain of salt. Again, truth in today’s world is hard to come by. But as an investigative reporter, presenting a brief overview of recent comments and statements for any informed citizen to process and digest seems a worthwhile and important enterprise.

A timeline of recently unfolding events: On 10/12/12 exactly one month after the Benghazi incident, the legal conservative group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents related to the Benghazi attack on September 11th, 2012 that killed the US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Obama, who had campaigned on a promise of transparency in the criminal wake of the Bush regime, has proven to be anything but open and transparent. Having to sue the US government for access to the records, on April 18th, 2014, a full year and a half later, the Obama administration’s stonewalling ultimately failed and Judicial Watch successfully got hold of 41 State Department Benghazi related documents. Emails between high level White House officials discussing damage control strategies in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi assault were released last week. Jubilant Republicans are now calling one of those emails their “smoking gun,” believing it is so incriminating that it will do in their would-be opponent Hillary Clinton from potentially competing in the 2016 presidential election.

The newly declassified email written by Obama’s then Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes specifically directed then UN Ambassador Susan Rice in preparation for her Sunday morning talk show appearances on September 16th, 2012 to explain the administration’s take on what it knew of the Benghazi murders. Rhodes advised Rice to attribute the Benghazi uprising as “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy,” pushing talking points designed to bolster Obama’s presidential image as a cool-as-a-cucumber-under-fire kind of wise and benevolent leader and statesman. The major emphasis of the email instructed Rice to blame the bogus anti-Moslem video as inciting a spontaneous protest like in other countries in the region that apparently grew violently out of control, of course all the while knowing that that was a boldface lie. This crucial piece of evidence proves that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both knew that the video did not cause the attack but that they chose to willfully deceive the American public in order to protect their own political careers and hence was born the infamously never ending Benghazi cover-up. Obama and Hillary withheld this damning email evidence even from the House Oversight Committee led by Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) requesting all documents pertaining to Benghazi more than a year ago. With the presidential election less than two months away at the time of the attack, Obama and Hillary were determined at all cost to keep hidden from Americans the real truth of criminal Benghazi activity they were guilty of engaging in during the months leading up to the attack. Last Thursday an angry Issa subpoenaed current Secretary of State John Kerry to appear before the committee on May 21st to further explain why those critical State Department records recently given to Judicial Watch were not among the 3200 documents originally handed over to his committee well over a year ago.

It was a Malaysian jet, carrying Malaysian passengers, flown by Malaysian pilots, yet after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014, Malaysia has been systematically blocked from participating in the investigation, leaving an overwhelmingly pro-NATO bloc in charge of the evidence, investigation and outcome as well as the manner in which the investigation will be carried out. Despite the integral role Malaysia has played during several pivotal moments in the aftermath of the disaster, it appears that the closer to the truth the investigation should be getting, the further Malaysia itself is being pushed from both the evidence and any influence it has on the likely conclusions of the investigation. With the downed aircraft in question being Malaysian, Malaysia as a partner in the investigation would seem a given. Its exclusion from the investigation appears to be an indication that the investigation’s objectivity has been compromised and that the conclusions it draws will likely be politically motivated.

With the Dutch leading the investigation, the logic being that the flight originated from the Netherlands and the majority of the passengers were Dutch, it has formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT). At the onset of its creation it seemed obvious that Malaysia would too be included, considering it lost the second largest number of citizens to the disaster and the plane itself was registered in Malaysia. Instead, JIT would end up comprised of Belgium, Ukraine, and Australia, specifically excluding Malaysia. Malaysia was both surprised and has protested its exclusion from JIT, and has repeatedly expressed a desire to be included directly in the investigation.

The Malaysian Insider cited Malaysian scholar Dr. Chandra Muzaffar who believes the decision to exclude his country from the investigation is politically motivated, aiming at excluding members that may urge caution and objectivity instead of draw conclusions first and bend the investigation’s results around those conclusions. In particular, Dr. Muzaffar believes that the investigations is intentionally being skewed to target Russia. Ukraine’s involvement in the investigation is particularly troublesome. Had MH17 crashed in Ukraine under different circumstances, Ukraine’s role would be welcome. However, it was apparently shot down specifically in a conflict in which Kiev itself is a participant. With both sides of the conflict possessing anti-aircraft weapons and with Kiev itself confirmed to possess weapons capable of reaching the altitude MH17 was flying at when it was allegedly hit, Kiev becomes a possible suspect in the investigation. Kiev’s inclusion in JIT represents a monumental conflict of interest.

Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them. Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands. The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.

According to other Republicans, some in the party establishment are so desperate to change the dynamic that they are talking anew about drafting Romney — despite his insistence that he will not run again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans who were briefed on the talks, though Romney has shown no indication of reviving his interest.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, herself an outsider who rode the tea party wave into office five years ago, explained the phenomenon. “You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’ ”