Asked whether any of his Republican counterparts could become president, outgoing Senate majority leader replies, 'Of what?'

Moscow (AFP) - Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged Russians to be patient Wednesday as the ruble plunged further due to falling oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine, and said the currency was now undervalued.

"It's definitely not necessary to go into hysterics," Medvedev said in an annual televised interview.

"Here, people just need to have patience and look at how events developed in a similar situation in 2008-2009 when the ruble weakened significantly," he told five television channels.

"Most economists and analysts agree that at the moment the ruble is excessively weakened, that is, it is undervalued," said Medvedev, who served a four-year stint as president from 2008 before ceding the Kremlin back to his mentor Vladimir Putin in 2012.

He warned that Russians could ultimately lose if they converted their savings into foreign currency.

The dollar is now up some 65 percent against the ruble since the start of the year.

The Russian currency is also at a level of 67 rubles against the euro, down from 45 rubles at the start of the year.

On Wednesday, the ruble hit a new record low of over 68 to the euro in late afternoon trading.

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Dmitry Medvedev, pictured during a live interview at the Ostankino television center on December 10, …

This year, falling growth has been exacerbated by the impact of Western sanctions on Russia over Ukraine and falling oil prices.

Authorities have repeatedly intervened but have so far been unable to halt the collapse of the ruble.

The World Bank on Tuesday announced a gloomier economic forecast for Russia, predicting its economy would shrink by 0.7 percent in 2015.

- 'In the same boat' -

Medvedev said that during the 2008-09 crisis when the ruble last fell dramatically against the dollar and euro, those who exchanged savings ended up losing money as the currency subsequently strengthened.

He added that he kept his own money in rubles.

"We are in the same boat," he said.

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Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev says the Russian economy "has probably lost tens of billions of …

Nevertheless, the prime minister conceded that ordinary Russians were suffering from rising prices and that while a weak ruble benefited exporters, it was harmful to the economy in the long run.

He reiterated the Kremlin's official line by saying that it was not up to Russia to lift the sanctions, which, he conceded, had cost the country billions of dollars this year.

"We didn't bring in these sanctions and we shouldn't be the ones to cancel them, that is their business," Medvedev said, harshly criticising the United States, whose current administration he said is "behaving unreasonably and unpredictably."

"Our economy as a result of these sanctions has probably lost tens of billions of dollars," he said.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov had earlier said that the Russian economy was losing some $40 billion a year over the sanctions.

"According to the calculations of our economists, the European economy has lost 40 billion euros only from cancelling contracts with Russia," Medvedev added in the interview.

Germany, Italy and France are Russia's biggest European trading partners.

Among the most high-profile EU-Russia deals to be hit by sanctions is France's delivery of two warships to Russia.

Although the deal was done before the EU imposed sanctions on Russia, Paris came under intense pressure to scrap the accord, and has since said it would postpone the decision on whether to hand over the Mistrals.

Medvedev’s promises to make Russia a freer, more democratic country created unprecedented hopes when he took office in 2008.

But he lost much of his influence after he willingly renounced his claim to a second term and swapped jobs with Putin.

Incensed by Putin's announcement of the job swap and subsequent fraud-tainted parliamentary elections in December, tens of thousands took to the streets in protests on a scale unprecedented since the turbulent days of the early 1990s.

A subsequent clampdown on freedoms dealt a huge blow to Russia's protest movement but some analysts say that mounting economic trouble could trigger a new wave of protests in the near future.

By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer DECEMBER 10, 2014

WASHINGTON — As the outgoing chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D) of Michigan was drawn to an item buried deep in the Senate torture report, released Tuesday.

It referred to Senator Levin’s own plan to establish a commission to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA, for its part, feared that such a move would lead to the discovery of videotapes of the interrogation sessions.

A measure to establish such a commission ended up being defeated in November 2005, in a roughly party-line vote of 43 to 55.

“The CIA destroyed the tapes the following day,” Levin said at a breakfast hosted by the Monitor Wednesday morning. “It reminds me of Watergate.”

The episode raises the question, too, of how much the White House knew about the CIA’s decision to destroy the interrogation videotapes.

In one of the report’s thousands of footnotes (footnote No. 2,488, to be exact) is an e-mail by the CIA’s acting general counsel, John Rizzo, suggesting that the CIA needed to get the “right people downtown on board with the notion of our destroying the tapes,” Levin said, reading the section aloud at the breakfast.

The “right people downtown,” said Levin, referred to the White House. The senator said he would leave it to others to determine the extent to which the executive branch knew about the destruction of the videotapes.

For now, much of the debate following the release of the torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has centered on whether there is any evidence at all that the torture produced actionable intelligence, as the CIA claims it did. The Senate report refutes these claims.

Levin said he has concluded “there is no evidence that it did.” However, as to another question, could torture under any circumstances produce actionable intelligence? “I imagine it could,” Levin said.

Yet even engaging in that debate serves in some sense to justify torture, which should not be used under any circumstances, Levin said. “Even if theoretically it could on some occasion produce intelligence that is really important and not obtainable by other means,” its use leads to the disintegration of US values and endangers troops who are less likely to receive the courtesies of the Geneva Conventions if their own country doesn’t abide by it, Levin said. “Our values are in jeopardy when we use torture.”

What’s more, the resources used by intelligence agencies – which threaten to become ever scarcer under sequestration, analysts note – "are going to be wasted because there are more false leads than good leads” as a result of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Levin said.

“People who are being tortured will say anything,” he noted. “There are more wild-goose chases that are undertaken. That uses up resources.”

(The Christian Science Monitor)

Glenn Canady

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Gordon Duff Destroys the Fake News in Syria!