Here we go again. The same trick over and over—and the sad part is, we fear most people are falling for it. (Or at least those who take note of such news at all.) Yesterday's AP headline read: "Tape: Scientist offers to build nuke bomb targeting New York." If you just read that and the lede, you would come away thinking Venezuela was trying to develop the capacity to nuke Gotham City. It is only if you bother to read futher that the bait-and-switch becomes clear. Venezuela was not involved at all. The dumb sucker who got busted had no actual contact with Venezuela—only an FBI agent posing as a Venezuelan official. To wit:

World War 4 Report has been keeping a dispassionate record of Barack Obama's moves in dismantling, continuing and escalating (he has done all three) the oppressive apparatus of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) established by the Bush White House. On the day of his 2015 State of the Union address, we offer the following annotated assessment of which moves over the past year have been on balance positive, neutral and negative, and arrive at an overall score:

A hacker who obtained blueprints of South Korean nuclear reactors posted internal information on the facilities, including the floor maps, on the Internet, threatening further "leaks" unless authorities close down the reactors, Yonhap news agency reported. Using an account dubbed "president of anti-nuclear reactor group," the hacker supposedly revealed on Twitter (apparently now deleted) the designs and manuals of Gori-2 and Wolsong-1 nuclear plants, evidently pilfered from the companies Korea Hydro and Korea Nuclear Power Co (KHNP). The post demanded the shutdown of the reactors by Christmas, warning "residents near the reactors should stay away for the next few months."

Lawmakers have slipped a provision into the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would allow a massive copper mine on public lands that are sacred to the Apache. Previous efforts failed to pass HR 687, or the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act, which would allow a subsidiary of international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto to acquire 2,400 acres of the Tonto National Forest in southeast Arizona in exchange for 5,000 acres in parcels scattered around the state. The massive underground copper mining project is fiercely opposed by environmental groups as well as the San Carlos Apache Tribe, which holds the area, near the town of Superior, as a sacred site. Now the land swap has been incorporated into the 1,600-page NDAA. A petition against the provision has been posted to the White House website. (ICTMN, Arizona Republic, Dec. 3)

India has opted to buy Israel's Spike anti-tank guided missile, a New Delhi defense ministry source told Reuters—evidently rejecting a rival US offer of Javelin missiles that Washington had lobbied hard to win. India is to purchase at least 8,000 Spike missiles and more than 300 launchers in a deal worth 32 billion rupees ($525 million), the source said after a meeting of India's Defense Acquisition Council. Spike beat out the Javelin weapons system, built by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had pitched during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Washington last month. (Reuters, Oct. 25)

The first issue of Resurgence (PDF), an English-language magazine produced by al-Qaeda's media wing, as-Sahab, includes an article on Xinjiang, or, as they call it, "East Turkistan"—the homeland of the Muslim Uighur people in China's far west. Entitled "Did You Know? 10 Facts About East Turkistan," it includes such blatantly false claims as that teaching the Koran is illegal in China, punishable by 10 years in prison, and that Muslim women caught wearing the hijab can be fined more than five times the average annual income of the area. It also claims that following its takeover in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party murdered some 4.5 million Muslims in Xinjiang. It mixes up these fictions with legitimate grievances, such as that China conducted numerous nuclear weapon tests in Xinjiang (the Lop Nur site)—but claims the radioactive fallout from these killed a wildly improbable 200,000 Muslims. It is more on target in noting the demographic tilt away from the Uighurs in Xinjiang: "In 1949, 93 percent of the population of East Turkistan was Uyghur, while 7 percent was Chinese. Today, as a result of six decades of forced displacement of the native population and the settlement of Han Chinese in their place, almost 45 percent of the population of East Turkistan is Chinese." Even this is overstated, however; both BBC and Wikipedia say that it is the Uighurs who make up some 45% of Xinjiang's population, ahead of the Han Chinese who constitute around 40%.

Bloomberg'a unsubtle headline is "India Beats China to Mars Orbit at 11% Cost of US Probe." The Indian Space Research Organization's Mangalyaan, or "Mars craft," made orbit around the red planet at a cut-rate $74 million, and reached Mars two days after NASA's $671 million MAVEN craft. Bloomberg quotes a statement from Beijing's Foreign Ministry congratulating India on "landmark progress" that is the "pride of Asia." But your can feel the grudging nature of the obligatory compliment. The account aslo states: "The South Asian nation is trying to keep up with China, which plans to complete a manned space station by 2022." As for MAVEN, NPR informs us it stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, and is "about understanding the history of the climate on Mars." Posing it in such neutral and apolitical terms is patently dishonest and begs the question of toward what aim? Accounts don't note that Halliburton is drawing up plans for mining operations on Mars. (Yes, really.)

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his Western allies charge that Moscow has sent at least 1,000 regular army troops into the two easternmost oblasts of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, to back up the separatist rebels there. Russia's President Vladimir Putin responds with an outburst of presumably unintentional irony. He compared Kiev's encirclement of rebel-held Donetsk and Luhansk to the 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad in which 1 million civilians died. Speaking at a pro-Kremlin rally at a lakeside youth camp, he also told supporters—some waving banners bearing his face—that Russia remains a strong nuclear power and therefore "it's best not to mess with us." He added that Russians and Ukrainians "are practically one people"—recalling his recent references to the disputed areas of southeastern Ukraine as "Novorossiya." So, let's get this straight... he accuses his enemies of being like the Nazis while enouraging a fascistic personality cult around his own leadership, while making claims to the territory of a neighboring country on ethno-nationalist grounds, and while threatening use of nuclear weapons. This is another example of what we call the Paradoxical Anti-Fascist Rhetoric of Contemporary Crypto-Fascism. Although in Putin's case, it is barely crypto.