The United States pretends to be a home of freedom and democracy. In fact, the US is rapidly degenerating into a police state and a worse dystopia than George Orwell imagined in his book, 1984.

John W. Whitehead describes below the prison that is being constructed for all of us. This prison is the work of many of our fellow citizens including scientists and entrepreneurs who have gained fame and fortune creating a prison for mankind. What were they thinking as they threw their energy and their lives into constructing a police state dystopia?

While Crimea has already had a referendum, the situation in other Ukrainian regions is still unstable. People want their voices to be heard and are demanding a vote. RT managed to get footage from people living in various cities in southeastern Ukraine. Many of the videos and interviews you will see in this film have never been shown on television.

Numerous US agents are helping the coup-appointed government in Ukraine to "fight organized crime" in the south east of the country, the German newspaper Bild revealed.

According to the daily, the CIA and FBI are advising the government in Kiev on how to deal with the 'fight against organized crime' and stop the violence in the country's restive eastern regions.

The group also helps to investigate alleged financial crimes and is trying to trace the money, which was reportedly taken abroad during Viktor Yanokovich's presidency, the newspaper said.

The head of the CIA, John Brennan, visited Kiev in mid-April and met with the acting Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and first Vice-President Vitaly Yarema to discuss a safer way to transfer US information to Ukraine.

I was there, in the burning trade union house building. I almost suffocated... the fire brigade was taking an inexcusably long to arrive, about 20 minutes had passed, I guess it was not a coincidence. The absolute absence of the police was no coincidence either. I was helped to escape from the building by people without uniform - apparently they were ordinary civilians. The fire brigade still hadn't arrived.

The only reason there were people in that people in that building was because the "ultras" and other "Ukrainian patriots" were attacking the people from all sides with sticks, stones, chains and Molotov cocktails. There was no other place to go to escape their brutality. The people ran into the building and were trapped. The people I saw in the building were very poorly armed: sticks, bats, plank fragments, that was it. No guns or anything like that. There were many women and old people there also, they had come to downtown Odessa to offer medical help, as a doctor, I was one of them. (I emphasize: there were no military professionals, mercenaries or foreigners!).

Very soon Molotov cocktails were thrown into the window of the building, the corridor caught fire. There was a fire extinguisher, but it was completely useless against the rapidly spreading flames. Eleven of us hid in one of the rooms, everything was pitch black because of the acrid, dense smoke. Everyone dropped to the floor where some breathable air remained. Next to me there were people, groaning and praying, others trying to reach their relatives on the phone and pleading with them to call the fire brigade. At least there was an open window in our room, through which some fresh air came. The situation in the corridor was infinitely worse. We were shouting, screaming for help. None came. Later my relatives told me that either nobody from the fire brigade picked up the phone or the line was continuously busy..

After about twenty minutes a rope was thrown to us, we tied it up to a radiator and the people slowly started to climb down. Ordinary people had climbed up on to the cornices of the building and were helping us to climb down because there was a serious risk of falling. I couldn't see if anybody came down behind me, all I remember was that we heard a mobile phone ringing inside the building behind us, but its owner wasn't answering.

When I reached the ground I was given some water, the same "Maidan supporters" that had started this murderous fire began to harass me, but I managed to escape before more of these "Europe and "Democracy lovers" arrived and started to beat the people who had just narrowly missed being burned alive.

... For the first time in my life I wanted to leave Odessa and Ukraine for good

A Satanist statue cast in bronze is just months away from completion, and activists hope that it will find a home on the lawn of the Oklahoma State Capitol. Ultimately, the statue - which features the seven-foot tall, horned figure of Baphomet fawned upon by two exultant children - is intended to stand directly next to a highly controversial monument of the ten commandments that was donated by a state legislator in 2012 and subsequently placed on the grounds of the Capitol.

The pagan Baphomet figure, complete with a goat head, angel wings, and a beard, comes from a recently-formed New York group identifying as The Satanic Temple, which raised over $28,000 on Indiegogo earlier this year to commission a sculptor and create the piece. Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucian Greaves tells ABC News that the statue is a symbol to "celebrate our progress as a pluralistic nation founded on secular law."

Ukraine has launched a military assault on the flashpoint town of Slavyansk, raising the stakes in the showdown with Russia, which has promised "catastrophic consequences" if Kiev stepped up operations.

Insurgents shot down two army helicopters, killing two servicemen, including a pilot, as the army tightened its noose around the rebel-held town of 160,000 people.

The predawn offensive drew a sharp response from Moscow, where a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said it dealt a "final blow" to a deal clinched last month in Geneva meant to ease the crisis.

A spokeswoman for insurgents in Slavyansk, the epicentre of tensions in eastern Ukraine, said the army had staged a "full-scale attack" on the town.

An AFP reporter on the scene saw a column of eight armoured vehicles breaching a rebel-held checkpoint just south of Slavyansk and heard explosions and sporadic small arms fire as helicopters circled overhead.

Deadly street fighting, helicopters shot down and civilians being used as human shields.

That was the picture that emerged Friday in southern Ukraine as violence escalated amid reports that dozens of people were killed in a fire and still more were shot dead or wounded in street fighting, raising the question of whether the country can stave off a possible civil war.

The violence -- pitting pro-Russian separatists against Ukrainian forces and those who support the government in Kiev -- prompted an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, with Russia demanding an end to what it called Ukrainian aggression and Western powers accusing Moscow of funding the violence.

Russia and the West have squared off diplomatically over the fate of Ukraine, after Moscow annexed Crimea in March following the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. He was pushed from office after months of protests by people upset that he had turned away from Europe in favor of Russia.

It doesn't get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs.

Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees.

Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families.

We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we're told the information constitutes "trade secrets."

Poor NATO. Damned Soviets. The benign North Atlantic Treaty Organization has spent two decades "trying to build a partnership" with Russia. But now, "clearly the Russians have declared NATO as an adversary, so we have to begin to view Russia no longer as a partner but as more of an adversary," according to NATO deputy secretary-general Alexander Vershbow, a former US diplomat/Pentagon employee.

The hot lava irony of a Pentagon hack carping about "Russia clearly trying to re-impose hegemony" is enough to put the Vesuvius to shame. But that's only a minor plot twist in NATO The Expandables (the movie).

NATO -- still in the process of being epically humiliated on a daily basis by a bunch of Pashtuns with Kalashnikovs in Afghanistan -- is now considering "new defensive measures" to deter "evil" Russia from "aggression" against NATO members, mostly the Baltic states. And that will mean deployment of "more substantial numbers of allied combat forces to Eastern Europe" -- mostly Poland. Permanently. Or, in Pentagonese, "semi-permanent unit training rotations". As if any doubt remained that Cold War 2.0 is here to stay.

NATO will "debate" the issue -- in its usual muddy waters fashion -- over the summer, and the result will be announced at a meeting in Wales in September, presided by Emperor Barack Obama himself.

Any analyst not embedded in the Pentagonese matrix knows that key European Union powers Germany and France -- which have solid economic and business ties to Russia -- will never buy this new spin for Cold War 2.0. As for other sizable NATO members, they are simply broke, and/or have better (economic) fish to fry at home.

Informed opinion also knows that were Cold War 2.0 to progress, payback will be handsome -- as in, just for starters, Russia simply killing the Northern Distribution Network, which allows NATO's escape route from its sterling performance in Afghanistan.

A car bomb attack in Nigeria's capital city has killed at least 19 people and injured another 60, according to officials.

The blast happened at a police security checkpoint near a bus station late last night in the city of Abuja.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bears the hallmarks of radical Islamic group Boko Haram, who set off another blast just yards away last month which killed a further 70 people.

The attack comes just days before the city hosts the World Economic Forum on Africa, which will attract prominent figures from across the globe including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is listed as a speaker.