Vladimir Putin Signs Order Making Steven Seagal a Russian Citizen (Source time.com) Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an executive order giving actor Steven Seagal Russian citizenship. The action film actor has visited Russia regularly over the last few years, and has been open about his approval for Putin. Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Seagal “has been insistent for a long time” in asking to become a Russian citizen, AP reports. “He is known for his warm feelings to our country, he never made a secret of it, and he’s also a well-known actor, which gave grounds to make him a Russian citizen.” Peskov said Seagal and Russia have bonded over martial arts—Seagal’s specialty—and through Putin’s push for national athleticism before the Sochi Olympics. In 2013, Seagal recounted first meeting Putin on Russian television, according to the AP. “The first time I walked into his home I saw a life-sized statue of Kano Jigoro, who is the founder of judo, so I was immediately taken and impressed and sort of wanting to get to know this man deeper and deeper.”

Selloff in Global Bond Markets(Source globalresearch.ca)

Global bond markets experienced a significant selloff last week, sparking fears that something much more serious could be developing. German bonds experienced their worst month since 2013. Yields on the country’s 10-year securities, regarded as the benchmark for European financial markets, rose to their highest levels for six months. In the US, the 10-year treasury bond yield climbed to its highest level since June. (The yield on a bond moves in an inverse relationship to its price.) The biggest selloff and rise in yields was in Britain where the return on a 10-year bond rose to a post-Brexit referendum high. Gilts, as they are called, have recorded their largest loss since the turmoil of the global financial crisis in January 2009.

The yield on these British bonds has risen from an historic low of 0.51 percent in the middle of August to 1.28 percent. This means that an investor who purchased bonds at the end of August has suffered a paper loss of £91,000 on every £1 million outlaid, or just over 9 percent, in the space of less than two months. There are two main reasons for the bond sell-off. The first is the expectation of a December interest rise by the US Federal Reserve, coupled with uncertainty over the future of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) quantitative easing (QE) program of bond purchases. The second is signs that inflation may be moving upward, which tends to depress bond prices. This is because bonds pay a fixed income and rising prices reduce the income stream and lower the value of the principal in real terms in the future. Peter Chatwell, head of rates strategy at Mizuho International in London, told Bloomberg: “The premise of the selloff so far was higher inflation and uncertainty on what the ECB is going to do next and particularly about how the next leg of quantitative easing would look.”

The Oldest-Known Carving of the 10 Commandments Is Going up for Auction (Source Smithsonian.com)
In the great tradition of construction workers stumbling across archaeological wonders, in 1913, workers building a railroad station near the present-day city of Yavneh, now in western Israel, made a surprising discovery. They found a stone slab with ancient writings carved into its face. As it turns out, this humble-seeming tablet is actually the oldest inscription of the Biblical 10 Commandments known to exist. Now, it’s going up for auction—with one little catch, Sarah Pruitt writes for History.com: the tablet has to be put on public display. Known as the “Samaritan Decalogues,” the tablet was likely carved in the late Roman or Byzantine era sometime between 300 and 500 A.D. and may have graced the entryway to a long-crumbled synagogue. While not quite as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back to the first century B.C., this tablet is the oldest-known carving of the moral code shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike. “There is nothing more fundamental to our shared heritage than the 10 Commandments,” David Michaels, director of antiquities for Heritage Auctions, which is handling the tablet’s sale, says in a statement.

Russia tells rebels to leave Syria’s Aleppo by Friday evening( Source Yahoo) Russia and the Syrian army on Wednesday told anti-government rebels in Aleppo to leave by Friday evening, signaling an extended moratorium on air strikes in the city. The Russian Defence Ministry, which is helping forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad to retake full control of Aleppo, said rebels would be allowed to exit the city unharmed and with their weapons between 0900 and 1900 local time on Nov. 4 via two special corridors. Civilians and the sick and wounded would be allowed to leave via six other corridors, it said.

The Syrian army released a similar statement later in the day calling on rebel fighters to cease fire and to “use this opportunity” to leave the city with their small arms. Rebels rejected the calls, an official in an Aleppo-based insurgent group said. “This is completely out of the question. We will not give up the city of Aleppo to the Russians and we won’t surrender,” Zakaria Malahifji of the Fastaqim rebel group told Reuters. He denied there were corridors guaranteeing safe passage and said civilians did not trust the government side.

President Vladimir Putin had ordered the pause in fighting “to avoid senseless victims”, Russia’s Defence Ministry said, adding that Syrian authorities would ensure its troops pulled back from the two corridors designated for rebels. Russia and its Syrian allies say they halted air attacks on Aleppo on Oct 18. Western governments said the strikes had killed civilians in large numbers, an allegation Moscow denied.

Humanitarian pauses designed to allow both rebels and civilians to exit the city have been organized by Moscow and Damascus before, but have largely failed amid continued violence with both sides accusing the other of stopping people from leaving.

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday that rebels inside Aleppo had taken heavy losses during fighting and were effectively trapped. “All attempts by the rebels to break through in Aleppo have failed,” the ministry said. “The terrorists have suffered heavy losses in lives, weapons and equipment. They have no chance to break out of the city.”

Russia Thinks The Cold War Is Back, But Americans Aren’t Paying Attention(Source thefederalist.com)

Russia is resurrecting Soviet-era tactics and moving, with allies like Iran, to change the international order, and we’re still acting like they’re our partners in places like Syria.

Imagine Russian school children practicing putting on gas masks and transporting dummies onto stretchers. TV stations show Russian emergency workers in hazmat suits working on bomb shelters. Huge numbers of the population rehearse what to do in case of a nuclear attack. It sounds like a scene from “The Americans” or a video from Soviet-era Russia. But it’s not. This is what’s been going on in Russia in the past few weeks. Russia is engaged in mass-scale nuclear attack preparations. Moscow is upgrading its civil defense plans, including making an inventory of all underground spaces to ensure it could shelter 100 percent of the population if a nuclear bomb hit. Current bomb shelters are being rehabbed and ventilation systems checked. Forty million Russians were involved in a drill simulating what to do in the event of a chemical or nuclear weapons strike.

This might seem surprising or unthinkable. But if you’ve been paying attention to the escalation of tensions between Russia and the United States, this fits perfectly into Russia’s intensifying belligerence and assertion of power. In the last few months, Russia’s relationship with America has begun to fray. But this mounting antagonism began much earlier, with Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and incursion in the Ukraine in 2014. Russia was testing how the West, including Europe and the United States, would react to it making land grabs in Eastern Europe. To its delight, the West did nothing. This set the stage for Russia to begin increasing its global show of force, and was a precursor to the inevitable invasion of one of the Baltic States.

Tensions further rose when Russia began fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al Assad in the ongoing brutal civil war. Under the auspices of attacking ISIS, Russia’s air force has helped Assad pummel Syrian rebels and civilians, creating a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. Despite numerous efforts at diplomacy by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the diplomatic process has completely deteriorated. Adding to the chaos, after a mistaken American strike on Syrian troops, Russia threated to shoot down American planes if its troops felt threated. As a reaction to crumbling negotiations in Syria, Russia declared earlier this month that it was withdrawing from a 2000 nuclear security agreement with the United States that called for disposing plutonium. The now-defunct treaty also required Russia not to use any plutonium for nuclear activities.