United States

Following numerous violations of last summer's landmark comprehensive nuclear agreement, as Iran repeatedly test fired ballistic missile rockets in direct contravention of the treaty terms, a curious tangent emerged last week when a senior Iranian military commander claimed that U.S. officials had been "appeasing" the Iranian regime, and quietly encouraging the Islamic Republic to keep its illicit ballistic missile tests a secret so as not to raise concerns in the region, according to Persian language comments.

Protests were held outside the Kedana U.S. Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan, after a young woman was murdered by a former marine. Kenneth Shinzato, a 32-year-old civil employee of the US military base in Okinawa, and former US Marine, has been arrested for his  involvement in the woman’s death. The latest incident comes just two months after a US soldier was arrested over the rape of a Japanese woman at a hotel in Naha in the south of Okinawa. These are not the only times that US military personnel have committed crimes in Japan.

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

Russia is preparing for war against the West.

Putin is being urged to do so because the U.S. and NATO have been preparing for war themselves.

Syria and Ukraine have just been warm ups. The real thing could be around the corner, and other proxy flashpoints are ready to line up.

Earlier today, a veteran White House correspondent laid out his version of how Obama "gets away with it" in a news cycle when everyone's attention should be glued to the economic failures of the lame duck president. One thing he forgot to mention, however, was the use of such conventional "rally around the flag" tactics as taking out a key symbolic nemesis of the US to drum up patriotic fervor.

A little over a month ago, conventional wisdom (and overrated pundits) said that Trump has no chance of being the republican nominee. They were all wrong, but so was the market which continued to ignore the possibility of a Trump presidency until well after the fact. And, as always happens, now is when if not the market, then certainly Goldman's clients are finally trying to catch up. As Goldman strategist David Kostin (who just one week ago warned that there is now a substantial risk of a market drop ahead of the year end), writes "Politics is now a topic in every client discussion."