Incredible. America now has more people in its stuffed prisons, 6 million, than were stuck in Stalin's gulag prison system. Reports Fareed Zakaria on CNN.com:

"Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That's not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and - Britain - with a rate among the ­highest - has 153...."

"This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.'s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison."

According to CEO of Russia's Almaz-Antei advanced arms makers Dr Vladislav Menshikov, his company continues work, started decades ago in the Soviet Union, to develop powerful airborne lasers capable of shooting down hostile aircraft and incoming missiles. Sources say a weapon of this kind can destroy targets travelling at altitudes of up to 40 kilometers.

Chief Editor of the Natsionalnaya Oborona (National Defence) journal Dr Igor Korothcenko is 'moderately skeptical':

Pictures presented by Washington and Kiev as evidence of Russia's involvement in Ukraine, and published on Monday by the New York Times, were unverified and in fact contradicted the claims they were to support.

The US State department acknowledged the error and the New York Times back-tracked on its Monday story, which claimed "photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration ... suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces".

The proof was this particular picture with an inscription "Group photograph taken in Russia".

John Kerry has attacked RT for its coverage of the Ukraine crisis, calling it a "propaganda bullhorn." Neglecting to address the US' role in the conflict or back up his assertions with any evidence, Kerry said Russia was behind the unrest in Ukraine.

During a press conference with the State Department on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry rounded on RT, lashing out at its Ukraine coverage.


"The propaganda bullhorn that is the state-sponsored RT program has been deployed to promote - actually, RT network - has been deployed to promote President Putin's fantasy about what is playing out on the ground," Kerry said. Furthermore, he said RT almost spends all its time "propagandizing and distorting what is happening, or not happening, in Ukraine."

Dismissing the entire eastern Ukrainian, anti-Maidan movement as sponsored and controlled by Moscow, Kerry did not address allegations of American involvement in Ukraine. Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that America was "running the show in Ukraine" and referenced the visits to Kiev of CIA head John Brennan and Vice-President Joe Biden.

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza's follow-up to his 2012 anti-Obama film "2016: Obama's America" will be an attack on the men who he sees as the intellectual pillars of the American left.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, D'Souza - who is currently awaiting trial on felony campaign finance violations - plans to release the documentary, titled "America," on the nation's birthday, July 4.

D'Souza told the Reporter that the footage he has of liberals Alan Dershowitz, Noam Chomsky, Bill Ayers, Michael Eric Dyson and Charles Truxillo will speak for itself.

"In '2016,' we let President Obama's voice be heard - literally," he said. "With 'America,' we also wanted to hear directly the voices of America's biggest critics. The conservative answer to offensive speech has always been not to silence it, but to listen carefully, consider what's been said and offer more speech. I was delighted that some of the smartest progressives in America agreed to sit down with me."

If one tallies up the members of President Obama's cabinet who played a role in crashing a bank before coming to help him govern the country or worked for a major law firm serving Wall Street before being hand-picked by the President to head up the bodies charged with investigating Wall Street, the Executive Branch begins to feel a lot like Wall Street West. That might explain why so many fellow Americans feel like Wall Street is running (and ruining and rigging) the country.

Is the President naïve or being maneuvered by the invisible hand? We were asking the same kind of question on May 6, 2008 during the President's first campaign for the Presidency:

After starting a propaganda stampede - with a lead story about photos of Russian troops purportedly in Ukraine - the New York Times admits the pictures really don't prove much, and one photo was labeled as snapped in Russia when it was really taken in Ukraine, writes Robert Parry.

Two days after the New York Times led its editions with a one-sided article about photos supposedly proving that Russian special forces were behind the popular uprisings in eastern Ukraine, the Times published what you might call a modified, limited retraction.

Buried deep inside the Wednesday editions (page 9 in my paper), the article by Michael R. Gordon and Andrew E. Kramer - two of the three authors from the earlier story - has this curious beginning: "A collection of photographs that Ukraine says shows the presence of Russian forces in the eastern part of the country, and which the United States cited as evidence of Russian involvement, has come under scrutiny."

In the old days of journalism, we used to apply the scrutiny before we published a story on the front page or on any other page, especially if it had implications toward war or peace, whether people would live or die. However, in this case - fitting with the anti-Russian bias that has pervaded the mainstream U.S. press corps - the scrutiny was set aside long enough for this powerful propaganda theme to be put in play and to sweep across the media landscape.

Only now do we belatedly learn what should have been obvious: the blurry photographs provided by the coup regime in Kiev and endorsed by the Obama administration don't really prove anything. There were obvious alternative explanations to the photos that were ignored by the Times, such as the possibility that these were military veterans who are no longer associated with the Russian military. Or that some photos are not of the same person.

Mainstream Media Is Being Forced to Retract Its Propaganda More and More Quickly

The New York Times pushed fabricated evidence in the run up to the Iraq war. A year later, the newspaper apologized for its inaccurate, one-sided coverage.

The U.S. and the New York Times pretended that Syria's government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack ... but that claim was debunked, and even the New York Times was forced to retract itseveral months later. (The alternative media, including Pulitzer prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh, has also pointed out that it was the Syrian rebels - with the help of the Turkish government - that was actually responsible for the sarin gas attacks).

Then the U.S. and the New York Times pretended that they had proof that Russian soldiers were the mysterious "masked men" seizing government buildings in Ukraine. But a couple of days later, they were forced reporting from the alternative media - especially Robert Parry, winner of the George Polk Award for National Reporting - into retracting that claim, and admitting that their "proof" was almost as flimsy as proof of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction".

It seems like the alternative media is forcing the New York Times to retract half-baked, pro-war, propaganda claims more and more quickly.

Russia's two newest ballistic missile submarines arrived at their home base in the Arctic on Monday to begin active service with the Northern Fleet, the Defense Ministry said.

The Borey-class submarine Yury Dolgoruky was commissioned in January while the second of the type, the Alexander Nevsky, entered service on December 23.

Both submarines will operate from the Northern Fleet's main nuclear submarine base at Gadzhiyevo, Murmansk Region, the ministry said.

The Borey is Russia's first post-Soviet ballistic missile submarine class and will form the mainstay of the strategic submarine fleet, replacing aging Typhoon, Delta-3 and Delta-4 class boats. Russia ultimately expects eight Borey-class submarines to enter service by 2020.

"The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power." (p. xiii)

"Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." (p.30)

Excerpts from The Grand Chessboard : American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, 1997

"We were promised in Munich that after the unification of Germany, no expansion of NATO would take place in the East. Then NATO expanded by adding former Warsaw Pact countries, former U.S.S.R. countries, and I asked: 'Why are you doing that?' And they told me, 'It is not your business.' "

- Russian President Vladimir Putin, Moscow press conference, April 2014

The United States is in the opening phase of a war on Russia. Policymakers in Washington have shifted their attention from the Middle East to Eurasia where they hope to achieve the most ambitious part of the imperial project; to establish forward-operating bases along Russia's western flank, to stop further economic integration between Asia and Europe, and to begin the long-sought goal of dismembering the Russian Federation. These are the objectives of the current policy. The US intends to spread its military bases across Central Asia, seize vital resources and pipeline corridors, and encircle China in order to control its future growth. The dust-up in Ukraine indicates that the starting bell has already been rung and the operation is fully-underway. As we know from past experience, Washington will pursue its strategy relentlessly while shrugging off public opinion, international law or the condemnation of adversaries and allies alike. The world's only superpower does not have to listen to anyone. It is a law unto itself.

The pattern, of course, is unmistakable. It begins with sanctimonious finger-wagging, economic sanctions and incendiary rhetoric, and quickly escalates into stealth bombings, drone attacks, massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, millions of fleeing refugees, decimated towns and cities, death squads, wholesale human carnage, vast environmental devastation, and the steady slide into failed state anarchy; all of which is accompanied by the stale repetition of state propaganda spewed from every corporate bullhorn in the western media.

Isn't that how things played out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria?

Indeed, it did. And now it's on to Moscow. Putin's survival and that of the Russian Federation depends to large extent to his ability to grasp the new reality quickly and to adapt accordingly. If he decides to ignore the warning signs hoping that Washington can be appeased or that the men who dictate US foreign policy can be persuaded to abandon the so-called "pivot to Asia", he could face the same end as Saddam or Gadhafi. So the first priority is simply to accept the fact that the war has begun. All future policy decisions should derive from that basic understanding.

So what does Putin know already?