The corporate propaganda media still cling to the lie that the US is the world’s biggest economy and China is number two. That is outright fiction… The Chinese have decided enough is enough and demanded real payment for their goods, not so-called US dollars.

The significance of the shift has been underlined by the double digit collapse in world trade in January and the shutting of US ports. Chinese exports in January fell by 11.2% year on year while imports fell 18.8%. Most of this was related to the US. The message is clear, the US is not going to be allowed any more to pay for stuff with money printed out of thin air.

In remarks reflecting an abiding mistrust of Rouhani's rapprochement with the West, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he was confident Iranians would vote in favor of keeping Iran's anti-Western stance on Friday in the first elections since last year's nuclear accord with world powers.

Rouhani's allies, who hope the deal will hasten Iran's opening up to the world after years of sanctions, have come under increasing pressure in the election campaign from hardliners who accuse them of links to Western powers including the United States and Britain.

Those accusations seek to tap into Iranians' wariness of Western motives and memories of a 1953 coup against nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh that was orchestrated by the United States and Britain and strengthened the Shah's rule.

One way or another David Cameron’s push for an EU reform deal will inevitably lay a foundation for the referendum campaign to follow, which in turn will ultimately decide Britain’s place in the world. So what do we know about how voters feel – and what kinds of voters are starting to coalesce around the rival Remain and Leave camps?

The first thing to say is that the state of the referendum race is actually not that clear. If you were to take a look at the results of opinion polls that are conducted online and then look at the results of polls that are conducted over the telephone then you would be left with two very different scenarios. Polls conducted online would tell you that the race appears to be very close, while polls conducted over the telephone would suggest that Britain looks set to remain in the EU – and perhaps by a comfortable margin.

Overall, therefore, and as Cameron continues to push Britain further toward a historic vote, there are opportunities and constraints on both sides. Whether or not Europhiles and Eurosceptics are able to take advantage of their strengths and navigate the risks remains to be seen.

The UK has always been an odd member of Europe. It was snubbed when it first tried to enter what was then called the EEC (European Economic Community) and had to wait till the 1970s to gain entrance.

Since then the game has changed. Initially the EU started out as a steel making cooperative association in the 1950s. This was to become the platform of an attempt by France and Germany to Federate Europe and create a United States of Europe. This goal is well advanced with few countries pushing back against a series of steps of ever closer union.

This Federation is not without purpose. For much of a 1,000 years or so you could divide Europe into three blocks, the Holy Roman Empire, France and Anglo-France (the countries that straddled the channel and by the 16th Century were just England and Wales.)

The EU is an attempt to guarantee European peace by merging the Holy Roman Empire and France, which has been the fault line of hundreds of years of catastrophic warfare. Britain is not critical to that solution and to many Brits the EU feels like a bolted on and unnecessary layer of government.

Admittedly, his deal is not a total overhaul of the European Union. But it’s a far more significant recalibration of Britain’s position within that Union than his critics were predicting. The “emergency migrant benefit brake” exceeds the five-year ban Nigel Farage called for. The “principled and upfront” protection outside the eurozone that Mark Carney, the Bank of England Governor, advocated has been won. So have the guarantees that Britain will be exempt from further “political integration” – the nightmare scenario painted by the Eurosceptics.

This is not quite the fundamental reform Cameron spoke of in his 2013 Bloomberg speech. But while the Out camp will mock, his assertion that the UK now enjoys “special status” within the EU is entirely accurate.

There has been much debate over the leadership of the respective campaigns. The Out camp have successfully avoided the impression that they are secretly working on behalf of the British establishment. But they have done so by cementing the impression that they are a bunch of ideological cranks. Michael Gove may be the face of the Out campaign, but Nigel Farage and George Galloway are its heart.

The Prime Minister has again wrongfooted his critics. In doing so he has revealed that the most important voice in the forthcoming EU debate will be his own.

The deal would in theory mean an end to fighting between the Syrian regime and all major opposition groups except for al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate and the Islamic State (Isil). The truce, which would begin at the stroke of midnight on Saturday, should also mean an end to Russian airstrikes against rebel forces.

However, news of the agreement was met with deep scepticism by observers of a conflict that has raged for five years and claimed around 300,000 lives. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, announced plans for a similar ceasefire two weeks ago but its start date came and went without an end to the fighting.

The deal would allow Russia to continue bombing Isil and the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda group in Syria. News of the peace deal could lead to an escalation of fighting as all sides scramble to take ground before the ceasefire takes hold. "Expect a major intensification in fighting this week," said Charles Lister, resident fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank.

As you read this article, there are thousands of military vehicles and hundreds of thousands of troops massed along the southern border of Turkey and the northern border of Saudi Arabia. If the command is given and those forces start streaming toward Damascus, it is inevitable that the Syrians, the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Russians would fight back.

It would literally be the start of World War 3, and the Saudis and the Turks are trying very hard to convince the United States to be involved. But the truth is that we don’t want any part of this conflict, because it could very easily become the very first nuclear war in the history of the Middle East.

The Saudis, the Turks and their allies have poured enormous amounts of money and resources into this war over the past five years, and now they are faced with the choice of either accepting defeat or directly intervening in this conflict themselves. But in order to conduct a full-fledged ground invasion, they are going to need justification for doing so. There are some that are suggesting that we could soon see a false flag attack that would provide that justification, so that is something to watch out for. I can’t remember a time when our planet has been so close to World War 3 potentially beginning.

The Democratic governor announced Sunday that he approved a bill requiring day care centers and day care homes to maintain immunization records proving their workers and volunteers have been vaccinated for the flu, pertussis and the measles.

This is a first in the nation bill that gives power to the state to mandate vaccines for adults. This is just the beginning of compulsory adult vaccinations as well as a precedent-setting law for forced medical treatments such as psych drug implants for the supposed mentally ill; forced chemotherapy for children against the parents’ will and whatever the medical mafia decides is profitable.

Scientists are telling us that they are not certain exactly how close this giant space rock will come, and that is rather unsettling. They say that it could come within roughly 1/20th the distance from the Earth to the moon, or that it could pass by millions of miles away. Because the orbit of this huge asteroid is unpredictable, they tell us that they don’t really know what will happen, but they insist that it will not hit us.

If it does pass us at 1/20th the distance from the Earth to the moon, that would be about half as far up as many of our communications satellites. That would be incredibly close, and many are wondering what may happen if our scientists are just slightly off in their calculations. This asteroid will be steamrolling along at 34,000 miles per hour, and it is quite alarming that our best scientists cannot tell us accurately exactly how close this asteroid will come.

Though it might be reasonable and comforting to assume labels declaring a product 100% Parmesan mean exactly that, what the FDA found in some food products bearing that label is far from reasonable — and, in some cases, far from food.

A tip to the US Food and Drug Administration in 2012 led to the alarming findings at Castle Cheese, as Bloomberg reported. Officials found the company “was doctoring its 100 percent real parmesan with cut-rate substitutes and such filler as wood pulp and distributing it to some of the country’s biggest grocery chains.”

That’s right: wood pulp.

Though cellulose is ostensibly harmless — and apparently, considered an acceptable additive that acts as an anti-clumping agent — several parmesan suppliers have been adding it in unacceptable quantities. In fact, Castle’s deviation from its Parmesan labeling was so grievous, company president, Michelle Myrter, will reportedly plead guilty this month. She faces a $100,000 fine, as well as up to a year in prison.

The fundamental issue, as you know, is that tens of millions of us wish to regain the right to govern ourselves – notably in the matter of immigration controls – and Mr Cameron never even asked for it: which is why his “renegotiation” was not a renegotiation at all, but a fraud on the public. The performance may obscure this for a moment, as bluster often does: but the truth will out, and has indeed been out for months.

When the Prime Minister mouths (as is his habit) the bromide “let me be clear” – he did it in his statement from Brussels on Friday – he betrays a defensiveness born of the fragility of his claims. What is “clear” is that nothing fundamental has changed. Britain does not govern itself, and will not govern itself should it choose, at the referendum, to stay in the European Union. As with any colony, its political life will be conducted at the pleasure of a foreign power. If we wish to change that, and be independent, we must vote to leave. Nothing has changed.

We now have the chance to care and think again: and to resume the history of a strong, independent, free country that participates in the world, unbound from an increasingly alien superstate that has proved, beyond doubt, that its political culture and aspirations can never be ours.

The owner of Saudi Arabia, King Salman al-Saud, speaking through his spokesperson and chosen Foreign Minister, in an interview that was published on February 19th in Germany’s magazine Spiegel, says that he demands the resignation or else the overthrow of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who is allied with both Iran and Russia.

Polls of the Syrian public, by Western polling firms, consistently show Assad to be overwhelmingly approved by the Syrian people to be the leader of Syria, and show that Syrians blame the United States for causing ISIS, which is disapproved of by 76% of Syrians. The other named jihadist groups, such as al-Nusra which is Al Qaeda in Syria, received similarly low approval-ratings from the Syrian public.

In stark contrast, a poll of Saudi Arabians shows that 92% of them approve of ISIS. But the United States is allied with the fundamentalist-Islamic dictatorship Saudi Arabia, against the separation-of-church-and-state democracy of Russia. So too is America’s fellow-NATO-member Turkey allied with the fundamentalist Muslims, and they’re publicly threatening to invade Syria with ground troops. They’re backed by planes that were supplied to the Sauds by the United States.

Robert Parry reported on February 18th, “A source close to Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that the Russians have warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Moscow is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to save their troops in the face of a Turkish-Saudi onslaught. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, any such conflict could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear confrontation.”

The Saudi Foreign Minister also says that his country is waiting for US President Barack Obama to take the lead in forcing Assad to resign, because, he says, otherwise Assad will necessarily be overthrown in a war, and there is a possibility that World War III could result…