That’s the message that was conveyed to a group of soldiers at Camp Shelby by an equal opportunity officer from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, according to a soldier who attended a recent briefing. ● “It’s unbelievable that the Army would ban ‘Christmas’ like it’s a bad word,” said Michael Berry, an attorney with the Liberty Institute, a legal firm representing the unidentified soldier. Two weeks ago, a routine meeting was held at the Mississippi base with various leaders of the 158th Infantry Brigade. During the meeting, they discussed an upcoming Christmas football tournament. The equal opportunity officer immediately objected to the usage of the word “Christmas.” “Our equal opportunity representative stopped the briefing and told us that we can’t say Christmas,” the soldier told me. “Almost the entire room blew up. Everybody was frustrated.

Kahlil Gibran ■ Jesus the Son of Man | His words and His deeds as told and recorded by those who knew Him

A road police patrol found the badly beaten opposition journalist, Tetyana Chornovil, in a ditch outside Kiev. Ukrainian authorities, leaders of the opposition and foreign officials are demanding an immediate and thorough investigation into the crime. ● On Wednesday night, law enforcement officers found a Chevrolet Aveo ‘parked’ in a ditch on the highway connecting the Ukrainian capital and Borispol international airport. Inside the car, they found journalist Tetyana Chornovil, who had been badly beaten up. They immediately took her to a hospital for treatment. A video later showed an unconscious woman with bruising over half her face, swollen lips and cuts across her cheeks. Medics applied several stitches to the journalist’s face and said she had suffered concussion and multiple broken bones. The 34-year-old journalist might require at least three operations. By evening, Chornovil was still said to be in a serious condition, the ‘Ukrainian News’ news agency reported. Still she managed to make several comments about the incident, and a criminal investigation was immediately launched.

A look at the International Banking Cartel led by the Bank for International Settlement (in Basel, Switzerland) known as the bank of central banks (58 central banks) and The US Federal reserve System. Also a look at banking tycoons: from the Rothschild family in Europe to JP Morgan and others in the US. How banks not only control governments but also appoint politicians through huge campaign donations. Governments at the service of the major banks, the best example: the Obama administration and the history's biggest bail out of the same institutions that caused the Great Recession.

Top Israeli defense official allegedly resigns over transfer approval for military equipment move to China; US fears Chinese sale to Iran. ● A top Israeli defense official was forced to step down last week, according to Maariv Sunday, after the United States expressed fury at Israel's decision to sell military equipment to China. Meir Shalit, the Department Head for Defense Exports at the Defense Ministry, announced his resignation last week. While Shalit did not announce the reasons behind his resignation, the report claims that he voluntary resigned after US official investigations last month over the transfer revealed that the move took place with his approval. Shalit apologized to the US in a visit late last week. The conflict, according to the daily, stems from different interpretations of the military weapon support contract between the US and Israel.

The Defence of Pakistan Council (DPC)’s grand national jirga Sunday asked the government to allow the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) to shoot down the drones if the US refused to stop the drone attacks. The jirga also asked the government to immediately halt military operations in the tribal areas, particularly in North Waziristan, and open dialogue with the Taliban in line with the unanimous decisions of Parliament, the All Parties Conference and the Cabinet’s Committee on National Security.

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

Abby Martin calls out the Daily Show's Jon Stewart for his soft ball interview with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, showing how the exchange between the two men only serves to whitewash the company's history of war crimes and legal impunity.

US President Barack Obama has signed into law a USD 633-billion military bill for 2013 despite his earlier threat to veto the measure due a number of reasons. ● The president on Wednesday night signed the bill using an autopen while on vacation with his family in Hawaii. Obama said that although he is still against certain sections of the bill, "the need to renew critical defense authorities and funding was too great to ignore." The bill had been approved by the House of Representatives and Senate in December. It includes cuts in defense spending agreed upon by the president and congressional Republicans in August 2011. It also authorizes nearly USD 480 million for the Israeli regime’s missile system and allocates USD 88.5 billion for the US-led war in Afghanistan, despite the Obama administration’s declared plans to draw down its forces in the Asian country.

Bill Van Auken ■ Just hours after receiving a report from his hand-picked advisory panel on National Security Agency surveillance operations, President Barack Obama used his end of the year press conference Friday to deliver an Orwellian defense of unrestrained US spying both at home and abroad. “I have confidence that the NSA is not engaging in domestic surveillance and snooping around,” Obama said, despite the cascade of revelations proving just the opposite. These revelations, including the latest from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, have established that the agency is collecting and storing billions of files recording the phone calls, text messages, emails, Internet searches and even the daily movements of virtually ever US citizen, not to mention those of hundreds of millions of people abroad. “The United States is a country that abides by rule of law, that cares deeply about privacy, that cares deeply about civil liberties,” he added. Who, at this late juncture, does the American president think he’s fooling?

On one question, Obama remained silent. The decision handed down by Judge Richard Leon in Washington on Monday referred to “the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented through the dragnet surveillance being carried out by the NSA.” Similarly, the report issued by Obama’s own advisory panel three days later concluded that “the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of...telephony metadata was not essential to preventing attacks.” In other words, the pretext provided repeatedly by Obama and US intelligence officials—that the massive spying was required to keep the American people “safe”—was a lie.

27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up Your Spine

South China Morning Post: Spy agencies targeted charities, Israeli leader, EU chief
AllGov.com: NSA Phone Data Collection Made No Difference to National Security

Initial reports from the Red Cross said the two days of fighting in the Central African Republic capital of Bangui earlier this month left 461 confirmed dead, and likely “over 500.” Today, Amnesty International’s own report suggested the Bangui toll was “nearly 1,000.” ● During the two day period, Muslim Seleka militias moved against Christians in Bangui, while Christian militias moved against Muslims in the nation’s north. The “nearly 1,000” is merely the two-day toll for Seleka attacks in Bangui, with at least 150 others killed in the north, and 60 Muslims killed in Bangui is retaliation for the Seleka strikes. The Seleka militias ousted President Bozize from power in March and were in the process of setting up a new government at the time. Tensions boiled over, however, and the militias quickly turned on one another, and mostly on civilian supporters of their rivals. France and the African Union have both deployed troops to the country to “restore order,” but mass displacement remains the real order of the day, with some 15% of the nation’s 4.4 million population “displaced” form their homes, and unlikely to be able to return any time soon.

Police shoot innocent bystanders, and just say oops, it was the mentally ill persons fault. | An UNARMED$ MENTALLY ILL man has been charged in a shooting incident that took place in New York’s Times Square in September. Glenn Broadnax was acting erratically and New York Police Department officers could not detain him, when the 35-year-old reached into his pocket. Police say they thought Broadnax was reaching for a gun and opened fire, hitting two bystanders and missing their target. The incident with the NYPD has sparked concern over how authorities deal with mentally ill people. Police in several states have been under fire recently due to such conflict where altercations have turned dangerous and many of these mentally ill people sustained life-threatening injuries. RT’s Ameera David talks to civil rights attorney Mayo Bartlett about the importance of training and the methods used to teach police officers how to handle these unfamiliar situations.

ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, DynCorp, G4S, Walmart and McDonald’s are just a few of the companies that the mega ‘charity’ supports. | With an endowment larger than all but four of the world’s largest hedge funds, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is easily one of the most powerful ‘charities’ in the world. According to its website, the organization ”works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives.” So how do the investments of the foundation’s $36 billion investing arm, the Gates Foundation Trust, match up to its mission? We dug into the group’s recently released 2012 tax returns to find out.

China has rejected 545,000 tons of imported US corn found to contain an unapproved genetically modified strain. An unapproved strain called MIR162 was found in 12 batches of corn, China's product safety agency said. | China backs genetically modified crops to increase food production, but has faced opposition from critics who question their safety. The agency called on US authorities to tighten controls to ensure unapproved strains are not sent to China. China allowed its first imports of a genetically modified crop, soybeans, in 1997. Authorities are trying to develop others that produce bigger yields or can resist insects without use of pesticides. China has already approved 15 varieties of genetically-modified corn for imports and MIR162 is awaiting approval.

Google revealed a sharp rise in requests from governments asking for political content to be removed from the web in its latest transparency report published on Thursday. ● From January to June the search giant received 3,846 government requests to remove content from its services – a 68% increase over the second half of 2012. “Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content. Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes,” Susan Infantino, legal director, said in a blogpost. “These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services. In this particular reporting period, we received 93 requests to take down government criticism and removed content in response to less than one third of them. Four of the requests were submitted as copyright claims,” she said.