A day after President Obama ordered sanctions over Russia's military takeover in Crimea, Russian President Vladi­mir Putin emphatically rejected the U.S. position, saying his country could not "ignore calls for help" from ethnic Russians in Ukraine after what he has termed an illegitimate power grab there by pro-Western agitators.

Obama authorized the Treasury Department on Thursday to impose sanctions on "individuals and entities" responsible for the Russian intervention in Crimea or for "stealing the assets of the Ukrainian people."

The financial measures, and a separate ban on U.S. visas, are part of the administration's effort to squeeze Russia into pulling back its troops in Crimea, an autonomous, pro-Russia region of Ukraine that does not recognize the country's new Western-backed leaders.


After announcing his sanctions order and condemning a planned Crimean referendum on joining Russia as a violation of both Ukrainian and international law, Obama spoke to Putin on the phone for an hour in his latest outreach to the Russian leader.

But Putin, in a statement Friday, said he and Obama remain far apart on the situation Ukraine, whose new anti-Russian government he accused of making "absolutely illegitimate decisions on the eastern, southeastern and Crimea regions."

An American political analyst, Mike Billington, says the United States' plot to oust a sovereign elected government in Ukraine is a gross crime, adding that US President Barack Obama must be impeached over the Crimean crisis.The expert supposes it is a disgusting hypocrisy. Everyone knows is that it is not the Russians who are intervening in the internal affairs of Ukraine - it is the US indeed.

Everybody heard Victoria Nuland's open discussion with ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt about who they want to put in office and who they want to keep out on the street, continue the violent demonstrations that were going on.

The call for a referendum for separation in Ukraine is, in fact, contrary to the national constitution. But the vote to throw [ousted Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych out of office was also against the constitution, the expert assumes. It did not have the required number, according to the constitution, to impeach the president and therefore in fact Yanukovych is still the legitimate president, even though he is obviously not in office.

The U.N. Security Council is discussing a possible resolution that would reaffirm Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity and address Sunday's referendum on whether its Crimean Peninsula should become part of Russia, a council diplomat said Wednesday.

The diplomat said the resolution would aim to show the strong opposition in the U.N.'s most powerful body to a Russian takeover of the pro-Russia Crimea - even though permanent council member Russia is virtually certain to veto any resolution.

Another U.N. diplomat said supporters of the resolution also hope that China - a close ally of Russia which has spoken out in favor of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity - would abstain rather than join Russia in vetoing a resolution.

Former chief of Ukraine's Security Service has confirmed allegations that snipers who killed dozens of people during the violent unrest in Kiev operated from a building controlled by the opposition on Maidan square.

Shots that killed both civilians and police officers were fired from the Philharmonic Hall building in Ukraine's capital, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine Aleksandr Yakimenko told Russia 1 channel. The building was under full control of the opposition and particularly the so-called Commandant of Maidan self-defense Andrey Parubiy who after the coup was appointed as the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Yakimenko added.

Furthermore the former security chief believes that Parubiy has been in contact with US Special Forces that could have coordinated the assault.

"Shots came from the Philharmonic Hall. Maidan Commandant Parubiy was responsible for this building. Snipers and people with automatic weapons were 'working' from this building on February 20. They supported the assault on the Interior Ministry forces on the ground who were already demoralized and have, in fact, fled," Yakimenko said in an interview with Russian television.

The police officers were chased by a group of rioters armed with various weapons and at that point, Yakimenko says snipers fired at pursuers themselves.

"When the first wave of shootings ended, many have witnessed 20 people leaving the building," former chief says, noting that they were well-equipped and were carrying military style bag for carrying sniper and assault rifles with optical sights. Not only the law enforcers, but people from the opposition's Freedom, Right Sector, Fatherland, and Klitschko's UDAR party have also seen this, Yakimenko claims.

Traditionally, when we have thought of "Big Brother technology" we have thought of government oppression. But these days, it isn't just governments that are using creepy new technologies to spy on all of us.

As you will see below, "Big Brother surveillance" has become very big business. In the information age, knowledge is power, and big corporations seem to have an endless thirst for even more of it.

So it isn't just governments that are completely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do.

Corporations have discovered that they can use Orwellian technologies to make lots of money, and this is likely only going to get worse in the years ahead.

Below, I have shared a few examples of this phenomenon...

The following script is from "The Data Brokers" which aired on March 9, 2014. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Graham Messick and Maria Gavrilovic, producers.

Over the past six months or so, a huge amount of attention has been paid to government snooping, and the bulk collection and storage of vast amounts of raw data in the name of national security. What most of you don't know, or are just beginning to realize, is that a much greater and more immediate threat to your privacy is coming from thousands of companies you've probably never heard of, in the name of commerce.

60 Minutes Overtime How to defend your privacy online They're called data brokers, and they are collecting, analyzing and packaging some of our most sensitive personal information and selling it as a commodity...to each other, to advertisers, even the government, often without our direct knowledge. Much of this is the kind of harmless consumer marketing that's been going on for decades. What's changed is the volume and nature of the data being mined from the Internet and our mobile devices, and the growth of a multi billion dollar industry that operates in the shadows with virtually no oversight.

It's a narrative that's growing in popularity in the West: Vladimir Putin as a 21st-century Adolf Hitler, an unhinged dictator bent on collecting lost Russian lands.

It was floated first on CNN last week, where former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili - who fought and lost a war with Russia six years ago over a place called South Ossetia - compared Mr. Putin's stealth takeover of the Crimean Peninsula to the Nazi annexation of Sudetenland in 1938. The Canadian government has since embraced the storyline, with Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird using the Sudetenland comparison while denouncing Russian military moves in the Ukraine.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made similar remarks, and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton told a fundraiser in California: "If this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the '30s."

We are, worryingly, in a situation where such comparisons can't immediately be laughed off. Mr. Putin's own press conference this week was characterized by two things: his alarming insistence that Russia had a right to use its military to protect ethnic Russians living in other post-Soviet countries, and his bitterness at the West for ignoring him until he was pushed into a corner.

Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, and other officials from the BOE were put through a five hour marathon of questioning yesterday by Parliament's Treasury Select Committee covering everything from how long the BOE plans to continue Quantitative Easing (QE), to the potential for Scotland to vote for its independence, to what it knew and when it knew it about the rigging of the Foreign Exchange market by colluding global banks.

The bombshell of the day, however, did not occur during the session on the Foreign Exchange scandal, which is stacking up to be a more serious matter than the rigging of the Libor interest rate benchmark which occurred under the nose of the Bank of England and the British Bankers Association. (London now seems to be in competition with itself for the prize of the century for overseeing the rigging of the greatest number of markets.)

The bombshell came in the following exchange between the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie, and a very frightened appearing Paul Fisher, the Executive Director of Markets at the BOE, who has served in that position since 2009. Apparently neither Parliament nor the public knew prior to this exchange that the records of the pre-crisis year of 2007, the financial collapse in 2008, and the monetary policy maneuvers in subsequent years to prevent another Great Depression had been destroyed in one of the world's most important financial centers; not to mention the fact that critical recordings potentially relevant to the Foreign Exchange probe are also gone.

A recent public opinion poll asked Americans which of two options they would favour if a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict was no longer on the table. (It is in the rhetoric of leaders and diplomats but not in reality). The two options were:

"The continuation of Israel's Jewish majority (presumably this assumes permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and continuing ethnic cleansing of it by stealth) even if it means that Palestinians will not have citizenship and full rights."

"One democratic state for all in which Jews and Arabs would be equal." Only 24 percent supported the continuation of things as they are.

According to the poll, 65 percent of those asked for their opinion preferred the one state option.

What explains this?

Is it that an apparent majority of Americans are at last understanding and supporting the need and rights of the Palestinians for justice, or is it something else - an indication that while they are not much concerned about the rights of the Palestinians, an apparent majority of Americans are fed up with an Israel they rightly perceive to be the obstacle to peace?

As Crimea prepares to vote on Saturday March 16th in a crucial referendum on its future, the rhetoric coming from the West and its propaganda machine has hit a new and ridiculous low. Not only has US President Barack Obama and his administration done everything to undermine democracy in Ukraine, they have now resorted to the most naked forms of hypocrisy in an attempt to delegitimize the democratic process.

On Thursday March 6th President Obama spoke at the White House on the referendum and the issue of Crimea. In his prepared remarks, Obama stated categorically that the United States would not recognize the results of the Crimean referendum. He argued that the it would violate both the "Ukrainian Constitution and international law." Obama kept the comedy coming when he noted that, "In 2014 we are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders." As with all statements made by the US government, and the President specifically, this must be contextualized and deconstructed in order to be effectively critiqued.

First and foremost is the question of democracy and, more specifically, how exactly Washington is choosing to define this gravely abused word. In referring to the so-called "interim government" in Kiev, headed by Yatsenyuk and his associates, as "democratic leaders", Obama demonstrates either a complete lack of understanding of the word democracy, or as I think is more likely, an utter contempt for democratic principles. By referring to an unelected entity that has seized political power in Kiev by force, and through collaboration with Nazi elements, as "democratic leaders," Obama exposes himself and his administration to be cynical opportunists whose interests rest not in democracy but in a geopolitical agenda guided solely by strategic interests.