"NATO will be holding its 25th summit in President Obama's hometown of Chicago, United States, on 20-21 May 2012," the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has announced.

Five hundred pages of redactions. Mostly blank pages. That's what the public gets to see in the transcripts of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FROMC) meetings for 2007-2010. The long-awaited transcripts, released on March 7, pursuant to a Freedom Of Information Act request by MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan Show, undoubtedly hold some very important information about the Fed's activities and decisions during and since the financial crisis, including to whom the Fed has given trillions of taxpayer dollars in "loans" and bailouts -- and on what terms.

For the past several months, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter and architect of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, has been hawking his umpteenth book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power. As usual, Dr. Brzezinski can count on the establishment press to sell plenty of copies and keep the royalties rolling in with favorable reviews and lots of face time. The New York Times' reviewer opined that in Strategic Vision Brzezinski “provides a clear-eyed, sharp-tongued assessment of this hinge moment in time, when the world’s center of gravity is shifting ‘from the West to the East.’”

As the United Nations opened its latest conference on global warming, Mother Nature sent snowstorms and freezing temperatures that disrupted travel all across Europe and much of the Northern Hemisphere. Even Cancun, Mexico's sunny resort city that hosted the confab, was not spared the chill. The UN summit, known as COP16 (the 16th Conference of Parties on global warming), concluded Saturday morning after an all-night marathon session. Cancun may not have experienced blizzards and ice, but it did, nevertheless, get hammered with record low temps for the month of December.

The recently concluded economic summit (June 26-27) of leaders of the G8 and G20 nations in Toronto was, according to  most media coverage, an untidy row among those calling for continued government "stimulus" (Team Obama) and the rest of the major economies (led by Germany, the U.K., and China) calling for fiscal restraint and serious cuts in deficit spending. However, the much-ballyhooed disagreements over fiscal policy obscured the much more important result of the Toronto summit: the ongoing G8/G20 push to transform the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into a global Federal Reserve System, with financial regulatory powers to create money "out of thin air," as the Fed does, without having to request replenishments from IMF member nations.

"At the recently concluded session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Nicaragua came up against intense and concerted international pressure from fellow United Nations (UN) member states over the abortion ban the Latin American country's National Assembly adopted unanimously into law four years ago," reports the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM).

The escalating violence along the Mexico-U.S. border has reached new levels of ferocity, as rival Mexican drug cartels battle each other and, simultaneously, wage war against Mexico’s federal, state, and local governments.

"A record 69 people were murdered across Mexico on Saturday, making it the deadliest day since President Felipe Calderon took office just over three years ago," the Latin American Herald Tribune reported on Wednesday, January 13, citing Mexico's El Universal newspaper. The previous daily death toll record was 57 murders on Aug. 17, 2009.

Many China watchers were stunned by the announcement of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee on March 15 that prominent Party leader Bo Xilai had been removed from his post. For the past several years, Bo Xilai was a rising star in Communist China’s firmament. Many western observers have speculated that he would one day be China’s “paramount leader.”

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been riding the promotion circuit since his latest book, On China, was released on May 17 by Penguin Press. The release was timed to precede the 40th anniversary (July 9, 1971) of his secret trip to China that is credited with opening relations between the United States and the Communist regime of Mao Zedong (which was then assisting the Communist forces that were killing American troops in Southeast Asia).