I pity the fool who didn't listen.

Ever since May 2013, I've been warning against investing in the wannabe currency, Bitcoin. I called it nothing more than an "insidious currency scam."

Lo and behold, one of the most prominent Bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox, disappeared this week.

Like a thief in the night, it moved offices, shuttered its Twitter account and closed down its website - without any explanation.

And just like that, every sucker who owned any Bitcoins on the exchange lost everything.


Like Erik Voorhees, the man behind Bitcoin-sharing website, Coinapult.com. He had over 550 Bitcoins on Mt. Gox, worth almost $ 300,000. As he conceded, "I will never get any of that back."

No. You won't.

Pop quiz: When really nasty criminals and dictators want to hide their illicit gains, which country do they go to?

I'll make this easy for you - multiple choice:

a) Switzerland
b) British Virgin Islands
c) Hong Kong

With all the drama, history, and stigma surrounding Switzerland, most people would choose (A).

Yet over the last few years, Switzerland has worked hard to shed this reputation, even going so far as to propose laws making it easier for them to freeze dictators' funds.

But in reality, the correct answer to the question is (D), none of the above. It's the United States of America.

Russian authorities warned the FBI in early 2011 that suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have been a follower of "radical Islam," a revelation that raised new questions in Congress on Saturday about whether the Boston Marathon attacks that killed three and wounded more than 170 could have been prevented.

A senior congressional aide privy to the Boston Marathon terror investigation confirmed Saturday that the FBI received the warning after Tsarnaev's apparently suspicious activities caught the attention of Russian authorities keeping close surveillance on militant Islamist groups in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union.

The FBI acknowledged Friday that it had investigated Tsarnaev in 2011, even interviewing him and his family, but "did not find any terrorism activity," either domestic or foreign.

"The FBI had this guy on the radar and somehow he fell off," said the congressional aide, who said oversight committees on Capitol Hill are seeking answers from counterterrorism officials. "We heard for several days leading up to this there was no intelligence. Now we know there could have been intelligence."

The mercenary group formerly known as Blackwater worked as a "virtual extension of the CIA," the company's former CEO revealed to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, who obtained court documents showing the company argued as much when its executives were facing prosecution.

It has long been known that Blackwater, now called Academi, worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, and there were even some pretty straightforward clues that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince was an agency asset. That relationship is strongly clarified by the company's own legal defense in a three-year prosecution that collapsed in February, going from having the potential to jail several of the company's executives to wrapping up with a guilty plea from two men punishable by probation, house arrest and a $5,000 fine.

"Blackwater's work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked," Prince told Lake. "In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house."

Every July, Polish activists and other people who remember WWII commemorate the tragedy which happened in Volhynia and is known as the Volhynian slaughter. Polish Rzech Pospolita described the events as a tremendous and extremely ferocious ethnic cleansing campaign during which perpetrators not only killed entire families but also destroyed the material evidence of Poles' presence such as buildings, churches, and even gardens. The newspaper emphasized that it was a planned genocide committed by an organization with a criminal ideology which could be defined approximately as the Ukrainian version of Nazism and fascism.

The decision to carry out the "depolonization" of Volhynia and Polesia must have been made by the OUN (The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) between late 1942 and March, 1943. No directive to launch the operation has ever been published, nor is any evidence of its existence available, but there is no doubt that the activity was carefully planned.

1. The OUN leaders hoped that both Soviet Russia and Poland would fall as a result of the German onslaught as in 1918. Struggling over the future borders, the OUN-UIA (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) hoped to use the argument that there was no Polish population or military activity in the contested territories. The Bandera Movement used the same method of cleansing Poles from Galicia and Volhynia as the one widely employed by its political ally Germany: the physical extermination of the non-Ukrainian (or, speaking precisely, non-Galician) population.
2. The OUN had prepared in advance an ideological justification of the operation. It was a concept of racial and ethnic superiority of Aryan Ukrainians, which was modeled on the fascist theory of the superior race allegedly representing the highest point of the development of mankind.
3. The process of ethnic cleansing targeting the Polish population and the geography of the activity had been elaborately planned.
4. The Polish nationality was the criterion for selecting terror targets. Thousands of testimonies of survivors show that Poles and children from intermarriages were killed in mixed families while Galicians and Ukrainians in them typically were not (though it is hard to discern a general rule in the situation as cases of mass slaughter of Ukrainians who sheltered Polish refugees from Volhynia have been reported in the Zhytomyr Province).

At a short but contentious congressional hearing on Wednesday, former IRS official Lois Lerner repeatedly invoked her 5th Amendment right not to testify about the IRS targeting of tea party groups. This was the second time Lerner has declined to answer questions put to her by the House oversight committee.

Asked if he was considering a contempt citation against Lerner, Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said, "that's certainly something that has to be considered." He said he hoped to get answers from Lerner, and the committee will continue to seek answers in other places.

Issa adjourned the hearing while the ranking member, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), was speaking. Issa said Cummings was recognized to ask a question but instead "went into an opening statement," and therefore his microphone was turned off.

"The fact is, Mr. Cummings came to make a point of his objections to the process we've been going through," Issa said outside the hearing room. "He was actually slandering me at the moment that the the mics did go off -- by claiming that this has not been a real investigation.

"This has been a bipartisan investigation by multiple committees in which we had testimony in multiple hearings...in which it was very clear there was targeting of conservative groups -- in which there were people acting outside the norm," Issa said.

One of Britain's most senior judges actively campaigned to support a vile paedophile group that tried to legalise sex with children, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Lord Justice Fulford, named last year as an adviser to the Queen, was a key backer of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) which police suspect of abusing children on an 'industrial scale'.

An investigation by the Mail on Sunday has discovered that Fulford was a founder member of a campaign to defend PIE while it was openly calling for the age of consent to be lowered to just four.

It can also be revealed that the Appeal Court judge and Privy Counsellor:

• Planned demonstrations outside courts where defendants - described by prosecutors as 'sick' and a 'force for evil' - were on trial.

An Alabama lawmaker said his Republican colleagues would change their position on abortion if their daughters were carrying black babies.

State Rep. Alvin Holmes, a Montgomery Democrat, emphatically made the comments Tuesday during a debate on a bill that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat was detected.

The bill passed Tuesday by a 73-29 vote but is certain to face a legal challenge.

The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin, an Indian Springs Republican, compared the measure to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that overturned segregation.

That apparently offended Holmes, who is black, and he accused abortion opponents of racist hypocrisy.

"Ninety-nine percent of the all of the white people in here are going to raise their hand that they are against abortion," Holmes said. "On the other hand, 99 percent of the whites who are sitting in here now, if their daughter got pregnant by a black man, they are going to make their daughter have an abortion. They ain't going to let her have the baby."

Ukraine's interim prime minister, Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk, may prove to be arsenic to the beleaguered nation.

"Recall the phone exchange between the Ukraine ambassador and Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs) that got leaked out, where she basically said 'we want Yats in there.' They like him because he's pro Western," says Vladimir Signorelli, president of boutique investment research firm Bretton Woods Research LLC in New Jersey. "Yatsenyuk is the the kind of technocrat you want if you want austerity, with the veneer of professionalism," Signorelli said. "He's the type of guy who can hobnob with the European elite. A Mario Monti type: unelected and willing to do the IMFs bidding," he said.

Mario Monti was a centrist Italian technocrat who passed an austerity package that called for increased taxes, pension reform and measures to fight tax evasion.

Over the past several weeks, Ukraine has been battling political infighting between pro-Russian Ukrainians and pro-Europeans. The fight stepped into high gear in the fall when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych decided to tilt towards Moscow instead of Brussels in a trade deal. Last week, Yanukovych left Kiev and headed to an undisclosed location, believed to be holed up in a Russian Naval base.

NSA chief Keith Alexander says journalists who air the U.S. government's dirty laundry "have no standing" and "should be stopped".

NSA chief Keith Alexander has a knack for blundering his way into the headlines. Perhaps that's why now he's pushing for new laws to stifle journalist who leak information about the government's underhanded dealings.

This Tuesday the he following statement:

"Journalists have no standing when it comes to national security issues, They don't know how to weigh the fact of what they're giving out and saying, is it in the nation's interest to divulge this."

He then went on to say:

"I think we are going to make headway over the next few weeks on media leaks. I am an optimist. I think if we make the right steps on the media leaks legislation, then cyber legislation will be a lot easier,"

It stands to reason that Mr. Alexander's eagerness to get laws on the books to muzzle journalist is related to the latest round of leaks released by Snowden that revealed that the U.S. government has trained teams of internet trolls to disrupt conversations, divide political movements and discredit dissidents in the United States. Of course he is presenting this in terms of "national security" but keep in mind that this is the same NSA chief that was forced to admit that he had intentionally misled the public regarding terror plots in order to bolster public support for domestic surveillance.