A poll about the legitimacy of elected President of Ukraine Petr Poroshenko is doubtful, as residents of eastern Ukraine were not able to fully participate in the voting, a French expert Jacques Sapir believes. ● "The elections took place under difficult conditions in western Ukraine and in the Kiev region. It is obvious that Poroshenko has won the elections. But the elections could not be executed properly in the eastern part of the country. And this raises the question of the legitimacy of Mr. Poroshenko. He is legitimate in the West, but not in the East. And if he wants to be the president of all Ukrainians, he must reach an agreement with the protesters in the east of the country," the expert believes. Answering the question, whether the elections can be called democratic, Sapir noted that, in fact, the conditions of their carrying out were democratic. However, the fact that the presidential campaign was largely financed by Poroshenko and that in some areas of the country candidates for the post of the head of state did not have equal access to the media and could not properly talk about their proposals and themselves, calls democracy into question.

Daniel Patrick Welch: Farcical ’Elections’ in Ukraine
Stephen Lendman: Sham Ukrainian Presidential Election
Gregory Kolyada: Weapons, Prostitutes and Drugs –These are Things Petro Poroshenko is Associated With

Despite dozens of bodies being taken to the morgue in Donetsk, the Ukrainian government is denying that innocent locals are among the casualties in the army operation. The army's supporters in the US also deny that government troops are to blame. RT asked Globalist Research Center analyst, Martin Sieff, why the US is keeping so quiet about the civilian cost of Ukraine's military operation. He said it's because Washington has been caught off guard.

Thomas Gaist & Barry Grey: The bloodbath in Donetsk
Antiwar.com: 100 Eastern Ukrainians Killed in Ukraine’s Airport Offensive
RT.com: Ukrainian people pushed into fratricidal war - FM Lavrov
RT.com: Bodies of anti-Kiev fighters piled in Donetsk morgue - Video

Edward Snowden was trained as a professional spy and actually worked undercover abroad for America’s biggest intelligence agencies, developing their IT security architecture, the whistleblower revealed in an exclusive interview to NBC News. ● "I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden told Brian Williams, anchor on NBC’s on Nightly News. “So when they say I’m a low-level systems administrator, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d say it’s somewhat misleading,” he said. The NBC News pointed out that once Edward Snowden started to leak sensitive information about the methods and scale of NSA global surveillance, the Obama administration tended to speak about him as small fry, a thievish hacker that happened to be a system administrator at the NSA quite by chance.

BBC: Edward Snowden: I was a high-tech spy for the CIA and NSA

There will be no investigation into the alleged mass surveillance of German citizens, nor will there be an investigation into the NSA's alleged spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone, the German federal prosecutor has decided. ● The German federal prosecutor did not find enough evidence to warrant a criminal investigation, German media reported Wednesday, citing sources within the federal prosecutor's office. There will be no investigation into the alleged mass surveillance of German citizens, nor will there be an investigation into the NSA's alleged spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone, the reports said. Documents to terminate the preliminary investigations, which were in the works for months, are ready but not yet signed, according to the reports.

Reuters: Snowden says would have much to tell German inquiry

In a brief appearance in the White House Rose Garden Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced that the US would maintain nearly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan next year despite an official declaration of an end to combat operations. Obama said his plan to keep thousands of US military forces in the country for the next two years was dependent on the reaching of a military cooperation agreement with the incoming president of Afghanistan.

Stephen Lendman: Obama in Afghanistan

Moon of Alabama ■ Thomas Friedman continues to be the most dimwitted foreign policy commentator in U.S. media. Today he claims that Putin "blinked" on Ukraine by not invading it, something the Russian Federation never had any interest to do. But worse than such misreading of current foreign affairs events is Friedman's basic misreading of history. [...] It was the United States that "blinked" in the Cuban Missile Crisis, not the Soviet Union. It was Kennedy who pulled back not Khrushchev.

Paul Joseph Watson ■ Anti-EU revolution, Ukraine crisis threaten to derail global government || The 2014 Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark is taking place amidst a climate of panic for many of the 120 globalists set to attend the secretive confab, with Russia's intransigence on the crisis in Ukraine and the anti-EU revolution sweeping Europe posing a serious threat to the unipolar world order Bilderberg spent over 60 years helping to build.

The US House of Representatives, controlled by a pro-Israel Republican majority [read that again], adopted the National Defense Authorization Act for 2015 that includes the approval of $600 million military aid package for Israel for missile defense. ● The bill authorizes $350.9 million for the Iron Dome rocket defense system, that protects from short and medium-range missiles and rockets, and $268.7 million for David's Sling - providing protection from long-range missiles - and Arrow 3 - that could intercept ballistic missiles before they enter the atmosphere. Both David's Sling and Arrow 3 are missile defense programs developed in cooperation with the United States. The House also voted on an act obligating the president to report to Congress every three months on the status of various Qualitative Military Edge (QME) issues for Israel.

The White House has officially admitted that fake vaccination programs have been used by the United States as a cover for covertly stealing DNA samples from the public as part of the so-called "war on terror." The aim of the scheme, carried out in the Middle East, was to use DNA analysis to identify suspected terrorists who would then be targeted to be killed by the United States. As the New York Times reported in 2011, "In the months before Osama bin Laden was killed, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a phony vaccination program in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as a ruse to obtain DNA evidence from members of Bin Laden's family thought to be holed up in an expansive compound there." "CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organize the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic," reports The Guardian.

Dr. McGowan was being hounded by Zionist fanatics. His crime was publishing this article: What Does ‘Holocaust Denial’ Really Mean? In it, Daniel McGowan asked some uncomfortable questions:

But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm? For most Holocaust revisionists, or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to these three simple contentions: 1. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination. 2. There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich. 3. There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the alleged 55 million who died in WWII.

Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned? More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?

The short version is that rather than an anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish institution in which the particular people killed are randomly chosen this may have been a targeted killing or assassination, possibly tied to the Israeli security services. The big clue is this article by Amir Oren in Ha'aretz. The piece reads very vague. Oren notes the seeming professionalism of the killer, as revealed on surveillance videotapes of the crime. And he notes that the primary victims, Emmanuel and Mira Riva, were Israeli civil servants. Still, it's all very vague and speculative. But as Jeff Goldberg notes in a Facebook post, Oren's article reads like someone trying to say something within the confines of Israeli military censorship.

Richard Silverstein: Brussels Terror Attack and Mossad Connection

Richard Silverstein ■ Yesterday, I broke the story that the Rivas, an Israeli couple murdered in the Brussels Jewish museum terror attack, worked for agencies with connections to Israeli intelligence. Miriam worked for the Mossad and Emanuel for Nativ, a unit that encourages aliyah from Eastern European countries (including Russia). Thanks to reader Bluebird, who discovered that the Israeli embassy website in Germany lists Miriam Riva as an “attache” who worked there since 2007. My Israeli source informed me that they were both accountants. Though I don’t know how diplomatic postings and cover works, I do wonder why an accountant would be classified as an attache. Admittedly, you’d want to protect anyone working for the Mossad by giving them some sort of diplomatic protection. So it might be a pro forma status. Or it could mean that her job as an accountant was yet another form of “cover.”