President Putin urges Russian resilience for hard times

President Vladimir Putin has warned Russians of hard times ahead and urged self-reliance, in his annual state-of-the nation address to parliament.

Russia has been hit hard by falling oil prices and by Western sanctions imposed in response to its interventions in the crisis in neighbouring Ukraine.

The rouble, once a symbol of stability under Mr Putin, suffered its biggest one-day decline since 1998 on Monday.

The government has warned that Russia will fall into recession next year.

Speaking to both chambers in the Kremlin, Mr Putin also accused Western governments of seeking to raise a new "iron curtain" around Russia.

He expressed no regrets for annexing Ukraine's Crimea peninsula, saying the territory had a "sacred meaning" for Russia.

A Ukrainian soldier fires a cannon close to Donetsk airport this week

He insisted the "tragedy" in Ukraine's south-east had proved that Russian policy had been right but said Russia would respect its neighbour as a brotherly country.

Speaking in Basel in Switzerland later, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the West did not seek confrontation with Russia.

"No-one gains from this confrontation... It is not our design or desire that we see a Russia isolated through its own actions," Mr Kerry said.

Russia could rebuild trust, he said, by withdrawing support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Credit to BBC

Online news sites to be blacked out during next major catastrophic event?

 

(NaturalNews) According to what I’m hearing from several sources in my network of contacts, the U.S. government is putting systems in place to black out online news sites like Natural News, Drudge Report, The Blaze and many others. A practice run that took place earlier this week in California has already achieved this result and confirmed the technical ability to make it happen at will.

The recent outage of news sites experienced by internet users in California was reported bythis article on BeforeItsNews.com and confirmed by The Washington Times, The Blaze and other sites. The Natural News reader service team also recorded numerous complaints from California users who were unable to reach our website even though our site was fully functional and serving pages worldwide.

What was especially telling about this outage is that it only affected online news sites while allowing other internet traffic to flow normally. This selective targeting of news websites could have been accomplished by “deep packet inspection used inside the routers that move information packets along the internet,” reported Before Its News technical staff. “This technology allows ISP’s to look inside the packets your computer sends and receives and then make a decision to allow the packets through, modify the packets or block them. This technique can also be used to slow or speed up traffic.”

The selective targeting proves that this was not a general outage. The traffic blockage was specifically targeted to online news sites.

Online news censorship being prepared in advance of large-scale event

This selective blocking that took place earlier this week is widely believed to have been a dry run for a planned online news site blockade by the federal government during an upcoming “major event.”

What sort of major event? The sort of major event where the government wants its official narrative to be the only information allowed to circulate, obviously. These tend to be either terrorism events or false flag events which are seized upon by the government to enact harsh new police state regulations and surveillance initiatives to spy on the American people. Similar events in recent U.S. history include Oklahoma City, Waco and of course 9/11 — all of which were exploited to vastly expand police militarization and the surveillance reach of the federal government. (Patriot Act, anyone?)

What all governments know is the importance of “getting out in front of the narrative” and telling the government’s story first, before anyone else can look at the facts and present a more rational explanation for what happened.

Guccifer hacker warned of nuclear bombs in American cities – New York Times

The infamous hacker Guccifer, now arrested, is well known for hacking into the email accounts of members of the Bush family in the United States. According to numerous stories in the mainstream media, Guccifer acquired emails which spoke of a nuclear detonation in a major city in Pennsylvania in 2015.

A widely-cited story published in the New York times just two weeks ago revealed that Guccifer obtained information that he believed indicated a nuclear bomb would be detonated in Chicago and / or Pennsylvania in 2015. As the New York Times explains it, these are “wild conspiracy theories,” but the psychologist who interviewed Guccifer insisted the man wasn’t crazy at all.

From the NYT, Nov. 21, 2014: [2]

The English-speaking prison psychologist, who attended my meeting with the hacker, rolled his eyes as Mr. Lazar started reading his explanatory text in good but heavily accented English. It was a compendium of wild conspiracy theories involving so-called Illuminati, a secret cabal that he believes runs the world. Most of the conspiracies were old hat, like ones relating to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by Al Qaeda. But others, such as an alleged plan to set off a nuclear bomb in Chicago and an unnamed city in Pennsylvania next year, were clearly his own work.

The psychologist said he had heard them all before but nonetheless had no doubt about the state of Mr. Lazar’s mental health. “He is not really crazy at all…”

It is widely speculated across the ‘net that Guccifer stumbled across emails of high-level operatives who were discussing plans for nuking American cities. Speculation, of course, is not the same as proof, and it is entirely possibly this may be nothing more than Guccifer’s attempts to attract attention.

What event might be coming?

Regardless, there is no question whatsoever that the U.S. federal government has been accelerating its readiness for something big. During the recent Ebola scare (the first wave, because there’s still more to come…), it was widely reported that the U.S. State Department put out a bid for 160,000 hazmat suits. Are these for Ebola? Or something else entirely?

Theories of what might be coming our way in 2015 tend to focus on the following speculative possibilities, ranging from “nearly certain” to “way out there:”

• Global financial collapse, where the 2008 bankster bailouts have finally come back to haunt us again in 2015, causing a cascading collapse of global derivatives debt and the fragile banking industry. This would obviously be followed almost immediately by mass social chaos, riots, revolutions and so on.

• Nuclear attack by Russia, in the aftermath of the current petrodollar disaster where Russia is getting economically crushed by plummeting oil prices. See this excellent article by Mac Slavo for a full explanation of the dynamics.

• Nuclear terrorism in America, carried out by whatever radicals with foreign-sounding names the mainstream media wants you to hate at the moment.

• False flag terrorism deliberately carried out on American soil for political purposes (usually to blame some convenient political group such as the Tea Party).

Of these, I personally think financial problems are the most likely. There are already recent signs in the stock market that something has gone terribly awry and a severe market correction is long overdue. The U.S. Treasury’s recent creation of $1 trillion in new debt just to pay off old debt is downright shocking. Anyone who understands the power of compounding interest will immediately realize that the U.S. is plummeting toward certain financial insolvency.

I recommend this really good article on ZeroHedge.com which explains what’s really happening with the debt situation:

“You have to think about a huge tower of debt on shaky foundations where central banks pump concrete in the foundations in an emergency effort to avoid the building from collapsing and at the same time builders are adding additional floors on top…

We all are in a Ponzi world right now. Hoping to be bailed out by the next person. The problem is that demographics alone have to tell us, that there are fewer people entering the scheme then leaving. More people get out than in. Which means, by definition, that the scheme is at an end. The Minsky moment is the crash. Like all crashes it is easier to explain it afterwards than to time it before. But I think it is obvious that the endgame is near.

ACTION ITEMS: Do this now to avoid being cut off from independent news

Here’s what you can do to make sure you’re fully informed no matter what happens:

1) Write down the IP address of NaturalNews.com: 108.168.157.185. This is our internet address which you can access without using the domain name “NaturalNews.com.” Simply enter these numbers in the address bar of any browser, and you’ll go straight to our website.

2) Join SEEN.IS immediately, and start following Natural News there. Our address on seen.is ishttp://seen.is/profile/NaturalNews. Seen.is is the totally uncensored alternative to Facebook, and it’s rapidly growing in popularity among truth-minded people.

3) Subscribe to the Natural News email newsletter if you’re not already a subscriber. It’s free and you can subscribe using the form at the bottom of this article. We send a daily email newsletter with the hottest stories for the day. During a crisis, even if our website is offline, we will still send out the emails.

4) Sign up to follow us at TSU.co, another new social media website that doesn’t censor stories or spy on its users. Click here for the Natural News page on TSU.co, where you can sign up and help spread the word.

5) Follow us on DIASPORA, another truth-telling community of information pioneered by the brilliant minds in the open source community. Click here to visit the Natural News Diaspora pod (yes, we run our own pod) where you can sign up and monitor our news feeds throughout the day. During emergencies or a crisis, we’ll be posting on Diaspora, Seen, Tsu and other services to bring you the latest important information.

6) Get your own VPN account set up so that you can bypass local internet censorship. Search online for “VPN services” and sign up now. This is the technique used by Chinese citizens and Falun Gong members to bypass Communist China internet censorship — the same kind of censorship that’s coming to Communist Amerika.

7) Use Startpage.com as your search engine. It doesn’t track your searches or record your IP address. Use StartMail.com or Unseen.is for your email accounts. Don’t use the popular search engines and email services run by the technology companies feeding your information to the NSA. And yes, ALL the big tech companies are feeding your information to the NSA, just as Edward Snowden revealed in stunning detail. This includes Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.

8) Help support other alternative news websites such as www.BeforeItsNews.comwww.SteveQuayle.com www.AllNewsPipeline.com www.TruthStreamMedia.comwww.SHTFplan.com www.21stcenturywire.com www.TheDailySheeple.comwww.TheLibertyMill.com www.InfoWars.com www.Intellihub.com and so on. You may not agree with everything you see on all these sites, but these are truly independent voices which aren’t controlled by the corporate media machine. You won’t see recycled White House propaganda on any of these sites, for sure…

Sources for this article include:
[1] http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2014/12…

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11…

[3] http://www.allnewspipeline.com/Internet_News…

[4] http://www.naturalnews.com/047859_Treasury_D…

[5] http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/fallin…

Credit to Common Sense

No Prisoners in The Global Money War

French anger over 'Nazi style’ badges for homeless

Arnaud, a homeless man, wears a "security badge" during a demonstration in front of the City Hall of Marseille, southern France Photo: ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AFP


The southern French city of Marseille has been forced to scrap a system of yellow triangles intended to help spot homeless people after it was accused of employing Nazi-style tactics.

The cards, which were handed out to homeless people, detail their health issues and are bright yellow in order to be easily spotted.

But human rights groups and government ministers have criticised the "yellow triangle cards" in France's second city, saying they are "stigmatising", and hark back to the Star of David sewn onto Jewish people's clothes during the Holocaust.

La Ligue des droits de l'Homme, a human rights group, said it was troubled by the resemblance "of this card and the yellow star that the Jews had to wear during the Second World War."

The Socialist government was appalled. Marisol Touraine, the social affairs minister, said: "I'm shocked. Forcing homeless people to carry a yellow triangle indicating the illnesses they might have is outrageous. You don't point the finger at the poorest.

"You don't write their illnesses on their clothes. Medical confidentiality, in particular, is a fundamental right. I want this local initiative to be stopped," she told Le Parisien.

The card and triangle, an initiative of Marseille's town hall and social services, identifies the person with his or her photo, name and date of birth. It also details a person's illnesses or allergies.

The aim, local authorities, said, was to help health workers quickly provide aid to a homeless person who falls ill. More than 100 triangles have been distributed already.

On Wednesday, about 100 activists and homeless people protested against the initiative outside the city's town hall.

Marseille town hall has dismissed criticism, insisting "the card that saves lives". One of Marseille's deputy mayors Xavier Mery said: "I'm appalled by the absurd controversy surrounding this help card distributed by the Samu (social medical emergency services)."

However, facing with the rising controversy, Samu chief, René Giancarli, said last night: "We are going to change the look of this card. Our aim was only to come to the aid of the destitute as efficiently as possible. I really didn't see this row coming."

Credit to The Telegraph

Putin Vows to Punish Speculators Pushing Down Ruble’s Value

President Vladimir Putin vowed to punish speculators attacking the ruble with “harsh” measures in a defiant speech that reached into Russian history to defend his annexation of Crimea and compared his international opponents with Adolf Hitler.

“The authorities know who these speculators are and the instruments we can use to influence them,” Putin said today in his annual address to parliament regarding efforts to defend the country’s currency, which is trading near a record low. “The time has come to use these instruments.”

Putin, who did not comment on the tailspin in oil prices in his 70-minute speech, also announced plans for an amnesty for those returning capital to Russia. The president said he’ll eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy as he works to reassure a nation threatened by a spiraling economic crisis.

Credit to Bloomberg

‘Near Perfect’ Indicator That Precedes Almost Every Stock Market Correction Is Flashing A Warning Signal

Are we about to see U.S. stocks take a significant tumble?  If you are looking for a “canary in the coal mine” for the U.S. stock market, just look at high yield bonds.  In recent years, almost every single time junk bonds have declined substantially there has been a notable stock market correction as well.  And right now high yield bonds are steadily moving lower.  The biggest reason for this is falling oil prices.  As I wrote about the other day, energy companies now account for about 20 percent of the high yield bond market.  As the price of oil falls, investors are understandably becoming concerned about the future prospects of those companies and are dumping their bonds.  What is happening cannot be described as a “crash” just yet, but there has been a pretty sizable decline for junk bonds over the past month.  And as I noted above, junk bonds and stocks usually move in tandem.  In fact, junk bonds usually start falling before stocks do.  So does the decline in high yield bonds that we are witnessing at the moment indicate that we are on the verge of a significant stock market correction?

That is a question that CNBC asked in a recent article entitled “Near perfect sell signal says stocks should drop“…

The S&P 500 and the iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF are a mirror image since the start of the year, but since the end of October, high yield has diverged to the lower right, and yet the S&P 500 has continued to record highs. Since separating in October, the S&P 500 is up 3 percent, while the high-yield ETF is down 4 percent.

On 10 occasions since 2007, the high-yield ETF dropped 5 percent in 30 trading days. During nine of those instances, the S&P 500 fell as well, with an average return of negative 9 percent, according to CNBC analysis using Kensho.

Only once did high yield give a false sell signal. That was last year, when the market was already entranced by the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program, which has seemed to elevate stocks with an abnormal consistency. And even then, the S&P 500 managed just a 0.4 percent climb amid the junk debt rout.

Personally, I am convinced that this correlation between junk bonds and stocks is very significant.

Let’s just go back and look at what happened during the financial crash of 2008 for a moment.

In the chart posted below, you can see that high yield bonds began crashing in the middle of September that year…

But U.S. stocks did not crash at the same time.  In fact, the chart below shows that they did not really begin crashing until early October…

That is why analysts often refer to junk bonds as a “leading indicator”.  What happens to high yield debt is often a really good indicator of what is about to happen to stocks.

Now let’s take a look at what is happening today.

Since the beginning of November, junk bonds have been falling steadily…

Meanwhile, the Dow has continued to reach new heights…

This is not a state of affairs that can persist indefinitely.  Either junk bonds will rebound or U.S. stocks will start falling.

If the U.S. economy was on solid footing, you could perhaps argue that it could go either way.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.  At this point, the stock market has become completely divorced from economic fundamentals.  Price to earnings ratios are at absurd levels, margin debt is hovering near record highs, and the “real economy” continues to fall apart.  We are enjoying a massively inflated standard of living which is being propped up by the largest mountain of debt in world history, and it is only a matter of time before reality starts catching up with us.

And the signs of our long-term economic decline are all around us if you are willing to look at them.  For example, the lead headline on the Drudge Report today was about how China has now overtaken us and has become the largest economy on the planet…

Hang on to your hats, America.

And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.

The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.

Meanwhile, some of the most iconic companies in the United States continue to struggle deeply.  For instance, Sears has just announced that the number of store closings for this year is going to reach a total of 235 and that the company lost more than half a billion dollars during the third quarter of 2014 alone…

Sears Holdings Corp., posted a disappointing third quarter Thursday that saw revenue, earnings, and sales at stores open at least a year all fall as the retailer tries to salvage its business.

Sears, which owns Kmart, lost $548 million, or $5.15 a share, for the period ended Nov. 1. That’s up from a loss of $534 million, or $5.03 a share, in the year-ago period.

Even though Sears is losing more than 500 million dollars a quarter, banks and investors continue to inject new money into the corporation.  That is a crying shame, because Sears is a company that is going to zero.  Anyone that is investing in Sears at this point is just pouring their money into a black hole.  As Kevin O’Leary would say, they are guilty of murdering money.

And of course what is happening to Sears is just part of the broader “retail apocalypse” that I keep writing about.  In order for retailers to thrive they need healthy consumers, and consumers are not financially healthy because the real economy is a disaster zone.

But these days so many people are in denial.  The stock market has been soaring for so long that many skeptics are now proclaiming that another 2008-style crash will never happen.  Even though the fact that we are in the midst of an absolutely insane financial bubble should be glaringly obvious to anyone with half a brain, these skeptics have convinced themselves that the current state of affairs can persist indefinitely.

Sadly, it looks like what is about to hit us in 2015 is going to serve as a very rude wake up call for them and for the millions of other Americans that currently have their heads in the sand.

Credit to Economic Collapse

Mysterious green cat spooks Bulgarians

Fight Breaks Out In Parliament When Ukraine Learns It Has Quietly Become The Newest US State

It appears not all the government members approve of the new foreign-born members of the Ukraine parliament... as this fight just broke out...

And the result when other members discovered this...

The fight occurred after the majority of people's deputies supported the draft resolution on the appointment of the number of (foreign) members of parliamentary committees.

After the vote, the People's Deputy Vladimir Parasyuk began requiring word in explanation of vote, but the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Volodymyr Groisman refused it...

We don't blame them for wanting to know how they just became the newest US State...

Here the 3 new (foreign-born) members of Ukraine's parliament...





As RFERL reports,

Three foreigners -- Natalie Jaresko, Aivaras Abromavicius, and Aleksandr Kvitashvili -- were approved as ministers by Ukraine's parliament on December 2.

President Petro Poroshenko said their appointment, which has raised some eyebrows in Ukraine, was part of an effort to find "innovative solutions in the government" due to the "extraordinary challenges facing Ukraine."

Poroshenko naturalized all three hours before their confirmation by parliament.

All have given up their citizenships to comply with Ukraine's constitutional ban on dual citizenship.=

Natalie Jaresko, United States -- Finance Minister
Jaresko, who has Ukrainian roots, has lived in the country for more than two decades.

She moved to Kyiv in 1992, just months after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, to head the economic department of the newly opened U.S. embassy.

Prior to her relocation, she held various economic positions in the U.S. State Department.

She holds a master's degree in public policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor of science degree in accounting from DePaul University in Chicago.

In 1995, she left the U.S. Embassy to work for the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), an equity fund financed by the U.S. government, where she rose to the position of chief executive officer.

She established her own fund, Horizon Capital, in 2004.

During the Orange Revolution, Jaresko made no secret of her sympathies for the pro-Western uprising. She went on serve on then-President Viktor Yushchenko's Foreign Investors Advisory Council.

With the United States facing accusations of political meddling in Ukraine, Jaresko's new role has raised eyebrows.

U.S. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf has already denied Washington had any hand in her appointment.

Jaresko says the new cabinet of ministers intends to "change the country, improve transparency and eliminate corruption."

Speaking to parliament on December 2, she declared her readiness to "take on challenges."

Jaresko faces a tough job warding off economic collapse, battling corruption, and reforming Ukraine's economy as the country continues to fight an armed insurgency in the east.

Aivaras Abromavicius, Lithuania -- Economy Minister

Like Jaresko, Abromavicius is no newcomer to Ukraine.

Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, the investment banker has lived in Kyiv since 2008 and has a Ukrainian wife.

He is a partner and fund manager at the East Capital asset management group.

The group is a major player in Ukraine, where it invested almost $100 million in 2012.

Abromavicius describes himself as a Ukrainian patriot and has pledged "radical measures" to overhaul the country's battered economy.

He claims he hasn't yet discussed his ministerial salary, which he said he expected to be "very small."

He has voiced hope that his "efforts and experience will help Ukraine reach a totally different level of economic development, bring transparency and openness to government's work."

Aleksandr Kvitashvili, Georgia -- Health Minister

Kvitashvili served as health minister in his native Georgia between 2008 and 2010, under then-President Mikheil Saakashvili.

He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Tbilisi State University and a master's degree from the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service in New York.

After graduating in 1993, he did a brief stint working in the United States at the Atlanta Medical Center as an administrative and finance officer.

He returned to Georgia the same year to work for the United Nations Development Program.

He has since held positions at a number of healthcare-related organizations, including the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the Curatio International Foundation, the East/West Institute in New York, and the Transatlantic Partners Against AIDS organization.

Kvitashvili was rector of Tbilisi State University between 2010 and 2013.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has tasked Kvitashvili with introducing sweeping reforms to tackle rampant corruption among health authorities.

Despite his recent arrival in Ukraine, Kvitashvili, who does not speak Ukrainian, professes "deep respect for Ukraine and its people."

"I've been working on reforms in Ukraine for the past three months, but my love [for] this country has a much longer history," he said on December 2.


Welcome to America, have a nice day.

Credit to Zero Hedge