Michael Snyder ■ If the American people truly understood how the Federal Reserve system works and what it has done to us, they would be screaming for it to be abolished immediately. | If the American people truly understood how the Federal Reserve system works and what it has done to us, they would be screaming for it to be abolished immediately. It is a system that was designed by international bankers for the benefit of international bankers, and it is systematically impoverishing the American people. The Federal Reserve system is the primary reason why our currency has declined in value by well over 95 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger over the past 100 years. The Fed creates our "booms" and our "busts", and they have done an absolutely miserable job of managing our economy.

Ellen Brown: 100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility ■ December 23rd, 2013, marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, warranting a review of its performance. Has it achieved the purposes for which it was designed? The answer depends on whose purposes we are talking about. For the banks, the Fed has served quite well. For the laboring masses whose populist movement prompted it, not much has changed in a century.

Murray N. Rothbard: How To Abolish The Federal Reserve System ■ To save our economy from destruction and from the eventual holocaust of runaway inflation, we the people must take the money-supply function back from the government. Money is far too important to be left in the hands of bankers and of Establishment economists and financiers. To accomplish this goal, money must be returned to the market economy, with all monetary functions performed within the structure of the rights of private property and of the free-market economy.

Russia's first Arctic offshore field Prirazlomnoye, where Greenpeace activists were arrested in September after a high seas clash with Russian authorities, has started production of oil, energy company Gazprom said Friday. The project is almost a decade behind its initial schedule and is one of the most controversial energy projects, seen as dangerous for the environment by the Greens, who say that the drilling and storage platform is three decades old. "We became the pioneers of Russia's Arctic development," Gazprom's chief executive officer Alexei Miller said in a statement. President Vladimir Putin has said Russia's Arctic offshore riches are of a strategic importance for the country, which now is pumping an average of 10.6 million barrels of oil per day, close to its current capacity.

Last month British and U.S. intelligence officials speculated Snowden had in his possession a “doomsday cache” of intelligence information, including the names of undercover intelligence personnel stationed around the world. “Sources briefed on the matter” told Reuters that such a cache could be used as an insurance policy in the event Snowden was captured, and that, “the worst was yet to come.” The officials cited no hard evidence of such a cache, but indicated it was a possible worst-case-scenario. Some version of that scenario appears to have come true.

Late Thursday night, the Senate passed the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2014, in a sweeping bill now being sent to the president which reports suggest he will sign. The bill is infamous for its language on indefinite detention and "disappearing" of American citizens. Once again, the bill was passed via Fast-Tracking while most of the country was sidelined on the Phil Robertson issue with Duck Dynasty. The bill, now being sent to President Obama, also leaves out an amendment by Sen. Gillibrand on sexual assault prosecution, which in and of itself is curious. The bill passed the Senate in an 85-14 count, with the roll-call unavailable at this time.

Lawrence Solomon ■ Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the cause of global warming. 2013 marks the 17th year of no warming on the planet. 2013 has been a gloomy year for global warming enthusiasts. The sea ice in the Antarctic set a record, according to NASA, extending over a greater area than at any time since 1979 when satellite measurements first began. In the Arctic the news is also glum. Five years ago, Al Gore predicted that by 2013 “the entire North polar ice cap will be gone.” Didn’t happen. Instead, a deflated Gore saw the Arctic ice cap increase by 50% over 2012. This year’s Arctic ice likewise exceeded that of 2008, the year of his prediction. And that of 2009, 2010 and 2011. Weather between the poles has also conspired to make the global warming believers look bad. In December, U.S. weather stations reported over 2000 record cold and snow days. Almost 60% of the U.S. was covered in snow, twice as much as last year. The heavens even opened up in the Holy Land, where an awestruck citizenry saw 16 inches of snow fall in Jerusalem, almost three feet in its environs. Snow blanketed Cairo for the first time in more than 100 years.

Just when you thought Israel’s power was on the wane, the Jewish-owned Fed says it’s not gonna happen. With four Jews already heading the Fed - Bernanke, Yellen, Raskin, Stein - here comes Stanley Fischer as Vice Chairman. Fischer just happens to be the recent head of the Bank of Israel who suddenly resigned last January. Now we know why.

His new job is to lay a pipeline at the Fed reaching all the way to the Jewish State of Israel. He’s the right man for the job. Not only is Fischer a “dual citizen” of Israel and America (whose loyalties are obvious), he’s ‘well respected’ throughout the world of Jewish finance and central banking. He’s the ‘mentor’ of Bernanke, Summers, and Mario Draghi, (Goldman Sachs’ boy at the European Central Bank)…teaching his pupils how to gouge the goyim with interest on loans printed out of thin air.

It’s so easy! Just like trillions of TARP bailout money was sent to Jewish-owned Harley Davidson and countless foreign bodies by the Fed, so now the Jewish State gets first car on the gravy train. Israel will get all the money it needs to buy stocks and bombs to blow up the entire Middle East and take over the world. Our once sovereign nation is a land whose border reaches all the way to Tel Aviv to which bankrupt Detroit takes a back seat. America has become the ‘dispensable’ nation. Once the Jews bleed our nation dry they’ll dump us on the ash heap of history. But until then, they’ve got control of our nation’s money and they care not who makes our laws.

In September 2012, the Free Syrian Army encountered mild controversy when they bombed two hospitals in Syria and didn't even bother blaming the government, taking credit themselves. These were apparently functioning hospitals, staffed, and treating the wounded. These two episodes and any other hospital bombings will be explored below, along with any other acknowledged rebel attacks on hospitals that come to our attention.

Washington's Blog: Case Agasint Syria’s Assad Falls Apart

As of today, the Ugandan Parliament has passed the draconian "Anti-Homosexuality Bill" ("Kill the Gays" Bill). ● The internet is alight with numerous articles and links spreading this unexpected and shocking maneuver. The bill has, reportedly been revised to remove the death penalty punitive option, but allows life imprisonment to remain on the table. According to one source, part of the jubilation of the people, is that they never received the text of the bill in any of their native languages. There are many groups, each with their own key languages. The bill was provided only in English. A language of which they have little to no mastery.

Barbara Balanzoni, who saved dying cat while serving as a medical officer at a Nato base, is charged with insubordination. | A question is to be raised in the Italian parliament over the case of an army officer who was sent for trial at a military court last week for saving the life of a dying cat. Lieutenant Barbara Balanzoni, a reservist who has since returned to her civilian job as an anaesthetist in Tuscany, is charged with gross insubordination. She committed the alleged offence while serving as medical officer at a Nato base in Kosovo. It is claimed that, by attending to the cat, Lt Balanzoni disregarded an order issued by her commanding officer in May 2012 forbidding troops at the base from "bringing in or having brought in wild, stray or unaccompanied animals". She faces a minimum sentence of one year in a military penitentiary.

Washington’s Blog — It is well-documented that the U.S. government has – at least at some times in some parts of the world – protected drug operations. (Big American banks also launder money for drug cartels. See this, this, this and this. Indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. And the U.S. drug money laundering is continuing to this day.)

Jacob Appelbaum, a US Internet activist and one of the people with access to Edward Snowden's documents, has told a Berlin paper that his apartment was broken into, saying he suspected US involvement. Berlin resident and US national Jacob Appelbaum told Saturday's edition of the "Berliner Zeitung" daily that he believed he was under surveillance in the German capital. Appelbaum told the paper that somebody had broken into his apartment and used his computer in his absence. "When I flew away for an appointment, I installed four alarm systems in my apartment," Appelbaum told the paper after discussing other situations which he said made him feel uneasy. "When I returned, three of them had been turned off. The fourth, however, had registered that somebody was in my flat - although I'm the only one with a key. And some of my effects, whose positions I carefully note, were indeed askew. My computers had been turned on and off." He told the Berliner Zeitung that his experiences in Berlin might at first appear to be coincidence, but said that "when you start keeping track, their frequency does become striking."

Berliner Zeitung: Bericht: Snowden-Vertrauter wird auch in Berlin verfolgt
Berliner Zeitung: „Eine Taktik der Zersetzung“

Two masked men shot dead a [CIA] anti-polio vaccination campaign supervisor on Saturday morning after storming into his office in the Ghundai area of Khyber Agency’s Jamrud tehsil. An official of the political administration, Asmatullah Wazir, said that the supervisor Ghilaf Khan, a resident of Bara, Khyber Agency was working in his office at the Expanded Programme of Immunisation (EPI) in Ghundai.

Maryn McKenna: Update: Pakistan, Polio, Fake Vaccines And The CIA
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: How the CIA is Wrecking Polio Eradication in Pakistan
Donald G. McNeil Jr.: C.I.A. Vaccine Ruse May Have Harmed the War on Polio
Ben Richmond: Inside the CIA's Role in Pakistan's Polio Outbreak