Politics

We are one step closer to another full-blown return of the cold war.

Yesterday, during a briefing in Latvia's capital Riga, NATO Gen. Philip Breedlove said that NATO and the United States are switching their defense doctrine from assurance to deterrence in Eastern Europe in response to a “resurgent and aggressive Russia."

The comments by Breedlove come a day after the Pentagon said it would begin continuous rotations of an additional armored brigade of about 4,200 troops in Eastern Europe beginning in early 2017.

Iran is planning an ambitious initiative to connect the Caspian Sea to central regions of the country and the Persian Gulf, via an artificial channel link Sputnik news reports: The project, which is expected to be completed in the 2020s, is particularly interesting for Russia due to the cold spell with Turkey, but European and post-Soviet states will also benefit from it. In Iran, “work is underway to construct a navigable channel linking the Caspian and the Persian Gulf,” economic analyst Alexei Chickin observed. The initiative itself is not new.

Submitted by Clarice Palmer via TheAntiMedia.org,

As online publications have hailed the major protests overtaking the streets of Brazil at the outset of an apparent political revolution, few discuss the problems that have been brewing for decades in South America’s largest nation.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll poll shows that 63% of Americans - 82% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats - believe torture of suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified to gather information.

While it would be nice to beat the crap out of some bad guys to get them spill the beans - and prevent more terrorism - the truth is that torture DECREASES the amount of information we'll get and actually INCREASES terrorism.

We've Known for Over 2,000 Years that Torture Produces FALSE Confessions

We've known since ancient Rome that torture doesn’t work:

An international advocacy group has released horrifying details of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers. The US based group say that 98 girls in Central African Republic (CAR) reported that they were sexually abused by international peacekeepers, and three girls told U.N. staff they were tied up, undressed and forced to have sex with a dog by a French military commander in 2014. The report was released on Wednesday by AIDS-Free World, an advocacy organization that exposes injustice, abuse and inequality.