French security officials have warned more jihadist attacks are expected in the country as the level of terrorist threat has "reached a level without precedent." Counter-terrorism officials described the threat as "permanent".

"Not one day goes by without an alert, the discovery of a network trying to send people to Syria or Iraq, or an intervention (by the security services)," a high-level official from the Defense Ministry of France told AFP on condition of anonymity.

According to the source, there are currently around 4,000 people who are "identified or suspected of evil intentions" in France.

These aren't just amateurs, they include some highly educated people - "pros, not drop-outs," he added.

The Ukrainian government has given the private army of billionaire Dnepropetrovsk governor Igor Kolomoysky a day to lay down their weapons, after they occupied and erected a fence around the headquarters of the national oil company.


"We won't have armed personal security forces of businessmen and politicians on the streets of our cities. This applies to every single one of them," Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on his Facebook page.

"All security forces have 24 hours to comply with the letter of the law."

President Petro Poroshenko has also dispatched two battalions of the elite National Guard to Dnepropetrovsk, to diffuse "rising tension in the region."

The Harper government's pursuit of its odious Secret Police Act (C51) is just another chapter in the most through-going, and massive social engineering project in the history of the country. Social engineering used to be one of the favourite phrases of the right in its attack on social programs - accusing both liberal-minded politicians and meddling bureaucrats with manufacturing the welfare state. They conveniently ignored the fact that there was huge popular demand and support for activist government.

That was the so-called golden age of capitalism and it wasn't just because of expanding government services. It was so-called because of a much broader and well-informed citizen engagement - both through social movements and as individual citizens. The level of trust in government was much higher than it is today. And absent from the picture were the factors that today dominate the political conversation: fear and economic insecurity.

Exactly how historians will describe this period in Canadian history is anyone's guess but one approach could be to look upon the Harper era as an experiment in revealing how vulnerable democracies are to political sociopaths bold enough and ruthless enough to bend or break every rule and tradition on which democracy's foundation rests.

It's not just the institutions that are vulnerable though they certainly are. It's a familiar list including Harper's bullying of Governor General Michaelle Jean to force the proroguing of the House, his guide book on how to make parliamentary committees ineffective, the use of robo-calls and other election dirty tricks, his attempt to break the rules in appointing a Supreme Court Judge and his neutering the House of Commons question period through a deliberate strategy of refusing to answer questions - a practice that institutionalizes a contempt for Parliament that spreads outward to the general public. At a certain point it doesn't matter who is responsible - the institution itself becomes risible and irrelevant to ordinary citizens. Which is, of course, exactly what Harper intends.

Kiev said it will stop importing Russian gas from next Wednesday if Gazprom doesn't offer it a better price, according to the country's Energy Minister Vladimir Demchishin. Halting supplies through Ukraine could put Europe's energy security in limbo.

"It is necessary to buy Russian gas at the moment, but buying at a higher price than we can buy from Europe makes no sense," Demchishin said Monday, as quoted by TASS.

Similar claims have been made by Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk.

Last week, Ukraine Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko said gas imports from the EU would be $50 cheaper per 1,000 cubic meters.

Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said the price Ukraine would pay for gas starting April 1 could be $348, according to preliminary calculations. Under the current 'winter plan' Russia sells gas to Ukraine at $378 per 1,000 cubic meters, but it only after receiving prepayment from Kiev.

The 1953 coup remains a topic of global interest because so much about it is still under intense debate. Even fundamental questions — who hatched the plot, who ultimately carried it out, who supported it inside Iran, and how did it succeed — are in dispute.[1]

The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran's sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur.

The 1953 coup remains a topic of global interest because so much about it is still under intense debate. Even fundamental questions — who hatched the plot, who ultimately carried it out, who supported it inside Iran, and how did it succeed — are in dispute.[1]

The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran's sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur.

NATO calls Crimea "invaded" and "occupied." NATO has taught the world well what invasion and occupation really looks like, and Crimea isn't it. In 2001, NATO invaded and began the occupation of the South-Central Asian country of Afghanistan. The invasion and occupation has left tens of thousands dead, many more displaced, and has resulted in continued chaos and violence up until and including present day. Throughout the conflict, revelations of abuses, mass murder, and other atrocities including systematic torture have been exposed, perpetrated by invading NATO forces and their Afghan collaborators.

The war has also resulted in the use of armed drone aircraft which regularly kill men, women, and children indiscriminately along the Afghan-Pakistani border - a campaign of mass murder ongoing for nearly as long as the conflict has raged.

In 2003, NATO-members joined the United States in the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. An estimated 1 million people would lose their lives, including thousands of Western troops. For nearly a decade the United State occupied Iraq, and during its attempts to prop up a suitable client regime, laid waste to the nation. American forces in their bid to exercise control over the Iraqi population would conduct sweeping assaults on entire cities. The city of Fallujah would be leveled nearly to the ground, twice.

The US also maintained prison camps across the entire nation. Some vast and spanning, others dark and secret, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison and the atrocities carried out there. In addition to Western armed forces, a significant number of paid mercenaries participated in both the occupation and the atrocities carried out during it, including the mass killing of civilians resulting in criminal cases still reverberating through Western legal systems and undermining Western credibility worldwide.

Rampant Disinformation

NATO has announced that it is launching an "information war" against Russia. The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation.

It's well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion. Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies.

Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See this, this, this, this and this.

In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there's even less to constrain propaganda than before.

As the U.S. and several Eastern European NATO countries conduct a series of military exercises near Russia's border, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his Northern Fleet "to full alert in a snap combat readiness exercise" in the Arctic, state-run media reported Monday.

At least one Russian leader described the drill as routine and unrelated to the "international situation."

The fleet got its orders at 8 a.m. Monday, according to Sputnik, launching a land, sea and air drill that will involve 38,000 troops, 41 ships, 15 submarines and 110 aircraft.

"The main task of the (combat readiness drill) is to assess the armed forces from the Northern Fleet's capabilities in fulfilling tasks in providing military security of the Russian Federation in the Arctic region," Russian Defense Minister Gen. Sergey Shoigu told the media outlet. "New challenges and threats of military security demand the further heightening of military capabilities of the armed forces and special attention will be paid to the state of the newly formed strategic merging (of forces) in the North."

The drills will run through Friday, Sputnik reported.

The Ukraine government's latest maneuver - undermining the Minsk-2 agreement with a requirement for a rebel surrender - is likely to drive the country back into a full-scale civil war and push the U.S. and Russia closer to a nuclear showdown, reports Robert Parry.

By adding a poison pill to legislation implementing the latest Minsk agreement, the Ukrainian government has effectively guaranteed a resumption of the civil war, which U.S. hardliners and the mainstream U.S. media will no doubt blame on ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. media has focused on the so-called Minsk-2 agreement's cease-fire component, first claiming it was being sabotaged by the rebels and Russia but now acknowledging that it is shaky but relatively successful. But the larger point of Minsk-2 was that it would provide for a political settlement of the civil war by arranging talks between Kiev and authorities in the east that would lead to giving those areas extensive self-rule by the end of 2015.

But the implementing law that emerged this week from the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev inserted a clause requiring the rebels to first surrender to the Ukrainian government and then letting Kiev organize elections before a federalized structure is determined.

Washington looks to be throwing more than the full faith and credit of the US government behind Ukraine. On the heels of news that the US is set to guarantee a Ukrainian international bond issue (while Greek pensioners implicitly subsidize the country's natural gas exports), NATO is in the midst of conducting large scale military maneuvers along the Russian border in a move Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says encourages "Kiev to pursue a military solution." Over the course of 10 days, NATO will parade 120 combat vehicles across the region in an effort to prove how quickly the West can confront perceived Russian aggression. Here's more from Military News:

The [Russian] ministry warned that it hopes Europe "does see the risk of unconditionally following advice from U.S. generals and will not opt for approaches that will rule out the risk of a slide towards a military confrontation between Russia and NATO."

While the U.S. Army acknowledges the convoy's movement is "a highly visible demonstration of U.S. commitment to its NATO allies," Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the commander of U.S. Army Europe, insists "the focus should be on what is the desired end state, and can we get there using diplomatic and economic pressure and support."

So basically, the US is saying the following: "...although we're intent on showing just how quickly we can deploy our forces in the event an armed confrontation becomes necessary, we hope you'll see this for what it is which is our best effort to demonstrate that we long for a peaceful solution." We'll let you judge for yourself how committed the West is to a peaceful resolution (note the US soldier teaching the small child how to fire a high caliber weapon):