The government had urged Hatoyama not to visit the region, which was annexed by Russia about a year ago. Officials feared that if a former prime minister entered the territory with a Russian visa, it could conflict with Japan's stance that Russia unilaterally took the territory from Ukraine in violation of international law.

But Hatoyama, who served as prime minister for just nine months from 2009 to 2010, paid no heed to Tokyo's concerns, kicking off his three-day Crimea trip with a visit to the seaside city of Yalta, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.

"I possibly could in some way promote the development of cultural and humanitarian ties between Crimea and Japan," the agency quoted Hatoyama as saying.

The former prime minister was set to give a speech to university students in Crimea on Thursday, RIA Novosti reported.

The Ukrainian province was annexed by Moscow on March 18 last year, triggering international condemnation.

Japanese officials fear Moscow could exploit his visit in its efforts to justify the annexation.

Earlier on Tuesday in Tokyo, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said the government would "continue to urge former Prime Minister Hatoyama" not to visit Crimea.

Russia decided to suspend its participation in meetings of the joint consultative group on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe

NATO is disappointed with Russia's decision to suspend participation in the Joint Consultative Group on the Treaty of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), the alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Russia's Foreign Ministry said that Russia decided to suspend its participation in the Joint Consultative Group on CFE from March 11, 2015. Belarus will represent Russia's interests in this format. Thus, Russia's 2007 suspension of observance of its treaty obligations has become complete.

"This step [made] by the Russian side does not mean its rejection of further dialogue on control over conventional armed forces in Europe, if and when our partners are ready for it. We are still ready for joint work on the new regime of control over conventional armed forces in Europe, which will meet the interests of both Russia and other European countries," Anton Mazur, who headed Russia's delegation at talks in Vienna on military security and arms control, said.

Russia will explore the creation of a single currency across the Moscow-led Eurasian Union trade bloc of ex-Soviet states, according to an order published on the Kremlin's website.

The move comes as relations between union members Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan are strained by tit-for-tat sanctions between Moscow and the West over Ukraine and a Russian recession that is spilling over into neighboring economies.

According to the order, President Vladimir Putin requested Russia's government and Central Bank work with financial regulators in the bloc's member nations to present by Sept. 1 a report "defining the vector of financial and currency integration within the Eurasian Union and examining the desirability and possible creation of a currency union in the future."

The Eurasian Union was formed on Jan. 1 this year on the basis of an earlier customs union between several former Soviet republics. Russia lobbied hard to create the bloc, which unites around 170 million people and will be joined by Kyrgyzstan later this year.

But customs posts briefly reappeared between bloc members late last year as Russia tried to enforce a ban on a range of food imports from Western countries and the European Union that was adopted in retaliation for sanctions.

Meanwhile, a 50 percent fall in the value of Russia's ruble since last summer and an expected economic contraction of up to 5 percent this year have sparked currency devaluations and curtailed growth forecasts in post-Soviet nations that are heavily dependent on Russia's economy.

I voted for Barack Obama for president twice, for one reason: I thought he would not get us into a nuclear war. Now I'm afraid even that reason for my vote is wearing thin, threatened by US and NATO aggression in Ukraine. As the US continues threatening to send so-called "defensive" weapons to the Ukraine government and to impose yet more economic sanctions against Russia - despite the recent ceasefire agreement beginning to take hold - the prospect of Armageddon by accident increases. Moreover, Russian president Vladimir Putin has said he would (understandably) regard the US arming the Ukrainian military an act of war, to which Russia would respond. I don't think that means he would resort to nuclear weapons, at least initially. But if the already tense situation continues to heat up, anything could happen.

The latest is that the US is readying soldiers for Ukraine deployment. "The US Army is preparing to send approximately 300 troops at a time to train Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine, according to documents posted on a government contracting site." Oh, but they'll only be there as advisers, like in Vietnam. But then there are the "massive wargames in Eastern Europe and naval exercises in the Black Sea, [where] warships from the US, Turkey, Italy, Canada and Romania started drills" earlier this month. And then there's the NATO military parade on February 24, held just 300 meters from the Russian border. "About 140 pieces of armor and 10 times as many troops, including US soldiers, took part in that event." Naturally those suspicious Russians claim that "NATO is using the situation in Ukraine to push closer to Russia's border." And frankly, this makes me a little nervous myself.

But don't we need to take on "the new Hitler," as Hillary Clinton has called Mr. Putin, by any means necessary? Well, if Putin really were comparable to Hitler, at least we might have an excuse to be involved in Ukraine. But even then - updating our thinking from the 1930s - it should be the first rule of sensible geopolitics that nuclear powers never, ever fight. And it helps that Putin, to my mind, has committed no aggression in Ukraine.

Germany says it won't pay Greece World War 2 reparations after Greek PM Alexis Tsipras said Berlin is using legal tricks to avoid paying compensation. Germany says it's honored its obligations, while Greece says it may start seizing German property.

Germany once again dismissed Greek demands to pay reparations for the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Greece.

"It is our firm belief that questions of reparations and compensation have been legally and politically resolved," said Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"We should concentrate on current issues and, hopefully, what will be a good future," Reuters reported him as saying.

A spokesman for the finance ministry said there was no point in holding talks with the Greek government concerning the issue of reparations. The spokesman also added that the demands from Athens were just trying to distract attention away from the serious financial problems the country is facing.

Following the Duma, or Russian Parliament, President Vladimir Putin has signed the ratification of a law that sanctions Russian participation in the $100 billion BRICS Bank on Monday.

The BRICS bank, Putin has said, "will become one of the largest multilateral financial development institutions in the world".

"The bank and the Currency Pool, with combined resources of 200 billion dollars, lay the foundation for coordinating a macroeconomic policy between our nations," Putin said during the 6^th BRICS Summit in Brazil.

North Carolina's environmental officials have hit Duke Energy with a record $25 million fine over its role in contaminating local groundwater with pollution from a pair of coal ash pits at a disused power plant.

The Duke Energy power plant site in Sutton, North Carolina has a pair of unlined dumps estimated to hold 2.6 million tons of coal ash - the waste that's left after burning coal for electricity - which contains arsenic, mercury, lead, and over a dozen other heavy metals, many of which are toxic.

Monitoring wells near the dumps showed the pollution - which is considered a public health risk - included nine metals, among them boron, thallium, selenium, iron, manganese, and other chemicals that exceed state groundwater standards. Thallium was used for decades as the active ingredient in rat poison until it was banned due to being highly toxic.

One of the suspects in Russian politician Boris Nemtsov's murder, Zaur Dadaev, claims he had perjured himself when admitting his guilt, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said on its website late on Tuesday, citing its correspondents who, as a member of a public monitoring commission, met with Dadaev at the Lefortovo detention centre.

Earlier on Tuesday, judge of Moscow's Basmanny court Natalia Mushnikova, while reading out the court's arrest warrant, said Dadaev had admitted his involvement in Nemtsov's murder. Dadaev provided no comment at court but asked for a fair trial.

"They were crying all the time: 'Did you kill Nemtsov?' I answered no. At the moment of detention I was with my friend, my former subordinate Ruslan Yusupov. They told me they would let him free if I confess. I agreed. I thought I will save him and will be taken to Moscow alive... I thought as soon as I am in Moscow I will tell court the truth. That I am not guilty. But the judge did even let me speak," the Moskovsky Komsomolets quotes Dadaev as saying.

The city manager of Ferguson, Mo., has resigned in the wake of a critical Justice Department report on the behavior of local police. The city's municipal court has also been canceled for a week, with all cases being transferred to a state judge.

Ferguson City Manager John Shaw said he believes his resignation "is in the community's best interest," USA Today reported.

Shaw was blamed for behavior by law enforcement and the court system which the federal government found to be racially motivated and which primarily targeted African-Americans, according to The New York Times.

Transhumanists believe that the time has come for humans to take control of their own evolution. Many of them are fully convinced that we can use emerging technologies to "fix" the flaws in the human race and ultimately eradicate sickness, disease, poverty and war. So would you like to have the eyesight of an eagle? Would you like to download an entire library of information directly into your brain in just minutes? Would you like to rid your family line of all genetic diseases? Would you like to extend your lifespan to 500 years or even longer? Transhumanists promise that all of these things will soon be possible, if we are willing to embrace a new way of doing things.

They foresee a future in which we will all have lots of little nanobots running around inside of us, in which we are all connected directly to the Internet, and in which we have all been genetically modified to at least some degree. In fact, one prominent transhumanist recently stated that he believes that "eventually every human will be designed on a computer". In the end, the goal is to produce a vastly improved version of the human race which will usher in a golden new age for the planet. But as we merge ourselves with animals, machines and weird new technologies that scientists cook up, at what point do we cease to be human?

And when I say "weird new technologies", I am not overstating things in the least. Just consider what one transhumanist says that they have planned for us...

As with all radical social movements, there is bound to be resistance. After all, transhumanists are interested in some pretty bizarre things: mind uploading, living indefinitely through life extension science, biohacking themselves to install cyborg body parts, and creating artificial general intelligence. Each of these areas of research will radically change the lives of people—and some, such as cyborg body parts, are already doing so.

Once upon a time, the only people that talked about "cyborgs" were science fiction geeks.

But today, many transhumanists speak of us becoming "cyborgs" as if it was some sort of foregone conclusion. It is almost as if they are the Borg, and they are telling us that there is no choice but to assimilate.