Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is headed to Russia April 8 to meet President Putin. With Russia and China emerging as an alternative to US-World Bank economics, the safe bet could be on a Russo-Greco bridge.

Greece's Industrial Reform Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis and Syriza MP Thanasis Petrakos were in Moscow the last two days laying the groundwork for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' meet with Vladimir Putin. As a squirming cauldron of edgy bankers, politicians, and generals west of the Bosporus look on with prescience at the prospects, Russia and China have a singular opportunity. As a caveat, Petrakos told Spiegel Online and other media:

"This visit is very important for Greece. We intend to deepen our relationship with Russia in the energy sector and thereby hope to gain a significant advantage."

A couple of weeks ago I reported on Tsipras' acceleration of his meetup with Putin. With talks in Berlin and with Brussels upcoming, the Greek Prime Minister set out to play his country's economic hand with the cards he had been dealt. Holding a Russo-Greco deal over the bankers' heads, this was not genius, only deal-making 101. The follow up report the other day asking if Brussels had "warmed" to Tsipras' ideas of debt consolidation spoke of potential cooperation between Greece and Russia in terms of commodities like gold, and "collateral" to ensure Russia's "yield" on any deal would be guaranteed. What I did not speak of was long term gain for Russia, and all her investment interests, should Athens cement relations with Moscow. Here are some keen observations for predictive measures on the coming meetup.

Screams of "My God," metallic banging and the cabin jolting to one side - the final moments of the doomed jet were said to have been captured on video, which several newspapers said they watched. However, French prosecutors say it's a hoax.

German Das Bild newspaper and French Paris Match magazine say they managed to watch the video, found among the wreckage, of the final moments of flight 4U9525 before the tragedy.

However, the outlets didn't post the actual video on their websites.

The phone memory card managed to survive the collision with the mountain, say the outlets, claiming it was found at the site by the investigators.

Das Bild claim the authenticity of the footage is "unquestionable," though the scene on board was "chaotic, totally blurred and no individuals can be identified."

Asia Times' roving correspondent Pepe Escobar just returned from a reporting trip to the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the pro-Russian enclave in the Donetsk Oblast province of eastern Ukraine. The area's been the scene of heavy fighting between pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian military.

I've just been to the struggling Donetsk People's Republic. Now I'm back in the splendid arrogance and insolence of NATOstan.

Quite a few people - in Donbass, in Moscow, and now in Europe - have asked me what struck me most about this visit.

I could start by paraphrasing Allen Ginsberg in Howl - "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness".

But these were the Cold War mid-1950s. Now we're in early 21st century Cold War 2.0 .

Germany's national airline Lufthansa says that the flight data recorder which could provide key evidence about the causes of the Germanwings plane crash last Tuesday may never be found.

Speaking on Gunter Jauch, a popular Sunday night talk show, the Lufthansa manager Kay Kratky said "it could be that the damage was so serious that it [the flight data recorder] is sending no signal."

While the first black box, which contains audio recording from the cockpit was recovered soon after search and rescue teams arrived at the crash site, the second black box's whereabouts have remained elusive.

The plane is reckoned to have hit the crash site in the French Alps at a speed in the region of 800 kph, causing the plane to fragment and scatter over a wide area.

This column is adapted from a talk Chris Hedges gave Friday night at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

The scourge of male violence against women will not end if we dismantle the forces of global capitalism. The scourge of male violence exists independently of capitalism, empire and colonialism. It is a separate evil. The fight to end male violence against women, part of a global struggle by women, must take primacy in our own struggle. Women and girls, especially those who are poor and of color, cannot take part in a liberation movement until they are liberated. They cannot offer to us their wisdom, their leadership and their passion until they are freed from physical coercion and violent domination. This is why the fight to end male violence across the globe is not only fundamental to our movement but will define its success or failure. We cannot stand up for some of the oppressed and ignore others who are oppressed. None of us is free until all of us are free.

On Friday night at Simon Fraser University—where my stance on prostitution, expressed in a March 8 Truthdig column titled "The Whoredom of the Left," had seen the organizers of a conference on resource extraction attempt to ban me from the gathering, an action they revoked after protests from radical feminists—I confronted the sickness of a predatory society. A meeting between me and students arranged by the university had been canceled. Protesters gathered outside the hall. Some people stormed out of the lecture room, slamming the doors after them, when I attacked the trafficking of prostituted women and girls. A male tribal leader named Toghestiy stood after the talk and called for the room to be "cleansed" of evil—this after Audrey Siegl, a Musqueam Nation woman, emotionally laid out what she and other women face at the hands of male predators—and one of the conference organizers, English professor Stephen Collis, seized the microphone at the end of the evening to denounce me as "vindictive." It was a commercial for the moral bankruptcy of academia.

The military intervention in Yemen by a US-backed coalition of Arab states will undoubtedly inflame the conflict both in Yemen, and throughout the region. It is likely to be a protracted war involving many actors, each of which is interested in furthering its own political and geopolitical agenda.

However, it is the international reaction to this new regional war which is of particular interest; specifically, the way in which the United States has reacted to this undeniable aggression by its Gulf allies. While Washington has gone to great lengths to paint Russia's reunification with Crimea and its limited support for the anti-Kiev rebels of eastern Ukraine as "aggression," it has allowed that same loaded term to be completely left out of the narrative about the new war in Yemen.

So it seems that, according to Washington, aggression is not defined by any objective indicators: use of military hardware, initiation of hostilities, etc. Rather, the United States defines aggression by the relationship of a given conflict to its own strategic interests. In Crimea and Ukraine, Russia is the aggressor because, in defending its own interests and those of Russian people, it has acted against the perceived geopolitical interests of the US. While in Yemen, the initiation by Saudi Arabia and other US-backed countries of an unprovoked war with the expressed goal of regime change, this is not aggression as it furthers Washington's interests.

A group of international physicians' organizations has published a study concluding US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have killed more than 1.3 million people.

The Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, along with Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Global Survival have released a report titled "Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror.'" The study examined direct and indirect deaths caused by more than a decade of US-led war in three countries, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but did not include deaths in other countries attacked by American and allied military forces, including Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria.

The study noted that while the United States closely monitors casualty figures for allied troops—4,804 coalition deaths in Iraq; 3,485 in Afghanistan, the number of civilians and enemy combatants killed by US and allied forces is "officially ignored."


The IPPNW investigation, which scoured the results of individual studies and data published by United Nations organizations, government agencies and non-governmental organizations, concluded the ongoing war "has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan."

The rich and reactionary in Venezuela and their allies in Washington celebrated when Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez died two years ago on March 5, 2013. US President Barack Obama did not even make the customary and common courtesy of sending his condolences for the passing of a head of state.

Instead the US empire stepped up its demonization campaign against Chávez's legacy in order to bury his Bolivarian Revolution. In contrast to his treatment of Chávez, Obama was effusive in his praise of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who died in January 2015 and was the leader of a country which Amnesty International rightly labels one of the most tyrannical and repressive regimes in the world.

¡Yo Soy Chávez!

So why did poor and progressive people in Venezuela, throughout Latin America, and indeed all over the world mourn Chávez's passing and proclaim ¡Yo soy Chávez! ('I am Chávez')?

Lisa Sullivan, a School of the America Watch activist who has lived in the barrios of Venezuela where she brought up her three children, had this to say at the time of Chávez's passing: "Let there be no doubt: the Venezuelan people have come of age. Chávez is gone, but what resonates on every street and every plaza today: Yo soy Chávez. I am Chávez. I am the leader, the dreamer, the visionary, the teacher, the defender of justice, the weaver of another world that is possible."

Saudi Arabia, in an unprecedented act of unprovoked unilateral military aggression against Yemen by the autocratic absolute monarchy, was allegedly triggered in a US-backed attempt to restore what Riyadh is calling the "legitimate government of Yemen."

What exactly constitutes a legitimate government is not clear for a despotic regime where elections are not held, women cannot drive, and enemies of the state are beheaded in medieval displays of public barbarism not entirely unlike their ideological ambassadors among the so-called "Islamic State" or ISIS.

The Yemeni Houthi militias are in fact the only viable force fighting Al Qaeda and its affiliates in the Persian Gulf State located at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. With their recent successes on the battlefield leaving US-backed proxies in shambles, including apparently Al Qaeda itself, the West has decided it must take whatever measures necessary to stop them and reassert US interests in the region.

Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing, also known as Giscard or VGE, is a French centrist politician and a member of the Constitutional Council of France. He served as President of the French Republic from 1974 until 1981.

Extensive excerpt from Isabelle Laserre's interview:

Isabelle Lasserre: How do you view the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine by Russia?

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: Concerning the "return" of Crimea to Russia, very frankly, I judge it in conformity with history. I've re-read books describing Russian history of the 18th century. Crimea was conquered in the reign of Catherine II, with the predominant lead of prince Potemkin, when Russia went south toward Turkey with the idea of reconquering Constantinople. The conquest of Crimea was rather harsh, but it was not at the detriment of Ukraine, which did not exist, but at the expense of a local sovereign who depended on Turkey. Since then, it has not been populated by anyone but Russians. When Nikita Khrushchev wanted to increase the weight of the Soviet Union in the UN, which was then aborning, he invented Ukraine and Bielorussia to give two more votes to the Soviet Union, and he gave Ukraine authority over Crimea that it had never had before. At the time, already, I thought this dependance was artificial, and that it would not last. The recent events were predictable. Further, the return of Crimea to Russia has been largely approved by the population. It is only since the problems extended to the east of Ukraine that one gets worried.

IL: Numerous analysts and responsible politicians plead for a greater understanding regarding Vladimir Putin. Seeing that you've always been a supporter of detente vis-a-vis Moscow, during the Cold War as well as today, do you accept that one can thus violate international law and destabilize a country?

VGE: The conventional rules adopted at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 set the principle of respect for sovereignty and frontiers; in virtue of this principle, some suppose that Ukraine must absolutely keep the totality of territory that was theirs at the moment of Ukraine's independence in 1991. But let us not forget that the decomposition of the USSR happened in a stampede and provoked a crumbling of borders! But today, the question of Crimea ought be left aside. The matter of the east of Ukraine, though, is more difficult. Do not forget that Ukraine was long Russian; Kiev was the capital of Russia. Why, when I was finance minister, I went to the Soviet Union at the request of general De Gaulle, and Khrushchev received me in Kiev!

To see the matter clearly, you have to ask what really happened a year ago in the Ukrainian capital. What role did the CIA play in the Maidan revolution? What is the meaning of the systematic anti-Russian policy conducted by Barack Obama? Why did the US want to advance their pawns in Ukraine? Is there a potent Ukrainian lobby in the US? Do the Americans want to compensate for their impotence in the Middle East by conducting a harder policy against Russia on the European continent?