A meeting in Brazil this week will reveal whether Washington has succeeded in preventing international anger over the Edward Snowden revelations clouding discussions about future governance of the internet.

São Paulo is to host a two-day international meeting, starting on Wednesday, called by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, one of the international leaders who was a target of US surveillance.

International unrest over US and British internet surveillance has weakened Washington's ability to shape the debate about the internet's future, according to people involved in the process.

"The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open internet," said a former senior US government official.

The São Paulo meeting had the potential to become deeply political and expose rifts between countries over future control of the internet, said Greg Shatan, a partner at law firm Reed Smith in Washington. "It was called under extraordinary circumstances, it's a reaction to a perceived crisis," he said.

Pope Francis, in his Easter address before a huge crowd, on Sunday denounced the "immense wastefulness" in the world while many go hungry and called for an end to conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Africa.

"We ask you, Lord Jesus, to put an end to all war and every conflict, whether great or small, ancient or recent," he said in his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message.

Francis, marking the second Easter season of his pontificate, celebrated a Mass to an overflowing crowd of at least 150,000 in St. Peter's Square and beyond.

The crowd stretched back along all of Via della Conciliazione, the boulevard between the Vatican and the Tiber River.

Speaking under a sunny sky after a midnight rainstorm soaked the tens of thousands of flowers that bedecked the square, Francis weaved his message around the suffering of people across the globe.

Kiev ridicules claims by Russians that violence at Slavyansk checkpoint was caused by far-right Ukrainian nationalists

An international agreement to defuse the crisis in Ukraine was all but shredded on Sunday after a shootout in the separatist town of Slavyansk.

Three days after the Geneva deal brought modest hopes for a resolution to the gravest east-west stand-off since the end of the cold war, the midnight incident at a checkpoint - in which reports said as many as five people were killed - unleashed a torrent of accusations and counter-accusations that bodes ill for international peacemakers.

Russia claimed that far-right Ukrainian nationalists opened fire at the checkpoint just outside the town, seized by an armed pro-Russian militia two weeks ago. The foreign ministry in Moscow accused Kiev of failing to disarm "extremists and terrorists" and blamed the clash on the Right Sector, a nationalist Ukrainian group that has supported the pro-Western interim government in Ukraine.

The new self-proclaimed mayor of Slavyansk, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, said Russian troops were urgently needed to protect the civilian population. He threatened to "personally shoot" Ukraine's interior minister Arsen Avakov if he could.

The authorities in Kiev described the incident in the early hours of Sunday as a "crude provocation", made for Russian TV. They said some of the details of the shootout were so implausible as to be ridiculous.

The Mayor of Laguiole has appealed directly to French President François Hollande after a court ruled that the village's name was the property of a knife manufacturer.

Vincent Alazard's plea comes after the Court of Appeal ruled that the village's name cannot be attached to any product other than those under the Laguiole brand, several of which are made in China.

It is the latest twist in a long-running legal battle which has reportedly so far cost residents €100,000.

Despite the mounting legal costs the Aveyron village is considering a further legal appeal. Its 1,300 inhabitants are also said to be planning a march on the Élysée Palace.

A planned auction in Paris of personal items belonging to Adolf Hitler and Herman Göring has been cancelled.

The Conseil des Ventes Volontaires (CVV) said that the sale at Drouot on April 26 would not go ahead following protests from Jewish organisations. It said that the auction house had decided to cancel the sale.

The Vermot de Pas auction house, which had organised the sale said that it had faced "political pressure" including "insulting emails and phone calls".

The 40 items intended for sale included a monogrammed towel belonging to Adolf Hitler, a wooden chest emblazoned with swastikas, Herman Göring's passport and a 17th-century manuscript presented to Göring in 1935.

In this difficult hour of serious trouble on our Western borders, I would like to address the American people in order to help you understand better the positions of our Russian patriots, which are shared by the majority of our society.

Difference between the two meanings of being American (in the Russian view)

1. We distinguish between two different things: the American people and the American political elite. We sincerely love the first and we profoundly hate the second.

2. The American people has its own traditions, habits, values, ideals, options and beliefs that are their own. These grant to everybody the right to be different, to choose freely, to be what one wants to be and can be or become. It is wonderful feature. It gives strength and pride, self-esteem and assurance. We Russians admire that.

3. But the American political elite, above all on an international level, are and act quite contrary to these values. They insist on conformity and regard the American way of life as something universal and obligatory. They deny other people the right to difference, they impose on everybody the standards of so called "democracy", "liberalism", "human rights" and so on that have in many cases nothing to do with the set of values shared by the non-Western or simply not North-American society. It is an obvious contradiction with inner ideals and standards of America. Nationally the right to difference is assured, internationally it is denied. So we think that something is wrong with the American political elite and their double standards. Where habits became the norms and contradictions are taken for logic. We cannot understand it, nor can we accept it: it seems that the American political elite is not American at all.

4. So here is the contradiction: the American people are essentially good, but the American elite is essentially bad. What we feel regarding the American elite should not be applied to the American people and vise versa.

5. Because of this paradox it is not so easy for a Russian to express correctly his attitude towards the USA. We can say we love it, we can say we hate it - because both are true. But it is not easy to always express this distinction clearly. It creates many misunderstandings. But if you want to know what Russians really think about the USA you should always keep in mind this remark. It is easy to manipulate this semantic duality and interpret anti-Americanism of Russians in an improper sense. But with these clarifications in mind, all that you hear from us will be much better understood.

Last Sunday SOTT Talk Radio talked with world-renowned Jazz musician, essayist and author, Gilad Atzmon. Touring the world with the Orient House Ensemble he founded in London in 2000, Atzmon is an outspoken critic of Israel's policies, not least towards the Palestinians and neighbouring countries.

Born in Israel and grandson to an early Zionist 'freedom fighter', to say that Atzmon's insights about Israel and 'The Jewish Question' have raised a few hackles would be an understatement! Despite receiving support from such high-profile public figures as U.S. academic John Mearsheimer and U.N. Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, Atzmon's book The Wandering Who?: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics has been roundly condemned in Western media.

Accused of being 'anti-semitic' and a 'self-hating Jew', Atzmon counters his critics by continuing to shed light on the strong taboo against questioning Israel or the involvement of high-profile Jewish figures in global 'big power games'.

In this interview Gilad reveals some fascinating information about Jewish political ideology. Don't miss it!

The gap between the views of the elites and the people in the UK is wider than at any time in the last 100 years.

I mentioned it in an RT OpEdge in September, and now the democratic deficit has once again been highlighted by the relentless attacks on Russia and President Putin from members of our political and media elite. We've seen article after article and heard speech after speech attacking Russia and its president for what has happened in Crimea, and regular attempts to scare the public about the Russian 'threat'.

We've had articles claiming that Putin wants to 'regain Finland', and a warning that he could play the 'Crimean card' in the Baltic states. Yet, despite the torrent of crude anti-Russian propaganda we have been subjected to, which has surpassed anything we had in the coldest part of the 'Cold War' in the 1980s, there's plenty of evidence that this elite Russophobia is not shared by the general public.

Stephen Harper's acutely embarrassing behaviour regarding the crisis in Ukraine -- demonizing Vladimir Putin and upping the rhetoric -- must be welcomed in the U.S. which created the crisis in the first place and apparently believes it still has something to gain by isolating Russia. But it is not clear that Harper even realizes -- or cares -- what the larger game is.

And that game may include a Russia-driven shift in global currency allegiance that could devastate the economies of the U.S. and Canada.

The generals surrounding him in the ridiculous war-room setting where he announced Canada was sending six fighter jets to bolster NATO's military build-up in eastern Europe looked very uncomfortable. Who likes being used as a prop for a faltering politician? The setting was a bad case of over-acting -- as if we were joining the Allies in another world war rather than engaging in what one expert called "incremental posturing."

Is Harper just a useful idiot to the U.S. -- ranting and raving about Russian expansionism and imperialism so that the U.S. position looks more reasonable by comparison?

When Barack Obama took office, he pledged a new overture to the world's emerging powers. Today each of the Brics - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - is at loggerheads with America, or worse. Last month four of the five abstained in a UN vote condemning the fifth's annexation of Crimea. Next month India is likely to elect as its new leader Narendra Modi, who says he has "no interest in visiting America other than to attend the UN in New York". As the world's largest democracy, and America's most natural ally among the emerging powers, India's is a troubling weathervane. How on earth did Mr Obama lose the Brics?

Some of it was unavoidable. Early in his first term Mr Obama called for a "reset" of US relations with Russia. His overture was warmly received by Dmitry Medvedev, then Russia's president, who was considerably less anti-western than his predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Ukraine, Pussy Riot and many others, Mr Putin repossessed the presidency. The US president can hardly be blamed for that. Things have gone downhill since then.