President Barack Obama raised hackles on the Christian right this week during his address to the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast.

In the wake of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris by Islamic extremists and the atrocities committed on video by ISIS, Obama urged Christians not to get too complacent in their view of Islam as a violent religion and Christianity as a peaceful one.

"Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," said the president. "Slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

Conservatives greeted this assertion with their usual unflappable calm and equanimity, which is to say, of course, that they pretty much all started screaming and soiling themselves at once.

But because we're so nice here at the Raw Story Historic Corrections Desk, we thought we'd share some examples of Christian extremist violence for the edification of our right-leaning friends who seem to believe that it's nothing but Christmas trees and Easter lilies on their side of the church as opposed to IEDs and lynching ropes.

Let's begin, shall we?

Pro-independence fighters say there might be some foreign mercenaries among the pro-Ukrainian combatants who have been encircled near the city of Debaltseve between Donetsk and Luhansk.

"We have intercepted the talks in four different languages," Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) deputy of defense Edward Basurin told the journalists on Monday. "Those are English, Polish, French and some Flemish."

"At the same time, we do not have in [our] possession any personal belongings which could serve as proof," he added. "As soon as we get any we will show them to you."

Edward Basurin has previously said that the Ukrainian forces try to destroy any proof that there are international mercenaries fighting for the Ukrainian troops. However the DPR fighters have already got some indirect confirmation of the involvement of foreign fighters. On January 23, a representative of the pro-independence commanders said that they have discovered communication equipment and phonecards which are not being used in Ukraine.

International scientific conference "Yalta-1945. Past, Present, Future" takes place in the Livadia Palace in the Crimea. Seventy years ago, the palace was the venue for the meeting of the leaders of the USSR, the US and the UK, during which the foundations for the postwar world order were laid. Now experts gathered in the palace to discuss the need for "a new Yalta."

The conference was organized by the Civil Society Development Foundation, the Historical Perspective Foundation and the International Association of Peace Foundations. Politicians and scientists from Russia, European countries and Ukraine take part in the conference.

Russian President Putin did not take a direct part in the work of the conference. However, Putin prepared a special address to conference participants, in which he stressed out the inadmissibility of the dissemination of ideas of Nazism. Presidential envoy in the Crimean Federal District, Oleg Belavintsev, read Putin's message to the participants of the Yalta Conference.

Out of the bowels of a US maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaui, currently serving a life sentence, providentially has shed light on what amounts to the dirtiest secret of the "war on terror".

In over 100 pages of testimony, filed in a federal court in New York earlier this week, Moussaui drops several House of Saud-related bombs. Not least that among leading al-Qaeda donors prior to 9/11 we find former Saudi intel chief Prince Turki al-Faisal (also a former great buddy of Osama bin Laden); notorious former ambassador to the US and failed sponsor of hardcore jihadis in Syria, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush; darling of Western markets (and Rupert Murdoch) Prince al-Waleed bin Talal; and a who's who of Saudi Arabia's top Wahhabi clerics.

None of this is any novelty for those among us who since Afghanistan in the 1980s have been following the extraordinarily murky adventures of Wahhabi-sponsored/derived jihadism.

The information is even more relevant when compared to an upcoming book by Michael Springmann - the former head of the US visa section in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts that Rocked the World, Springmann essentially details how, "during the 1980s, the CIA recruited and trained Muslim operatives to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Later, the CIA would move those operatives from Afghanistan to the Balkans, and then to Iraq, Libya, and Syria, traveling on illegal US visas. These US-backed and trained fighters would morph into an organization that is synonymous with jihadist terrorism: al-Qaeda."

"The political purpose of these revelations, from Washington's point of view, is to put pressure on the House of Saud to keep pumping their oil surplus. The recent rebound in oil is causing some hysteria in Washington, because it may be linked to the Saudis having second thoughts about their oil price war against, most of all, Russia."

Well, in the beginning there was not even an "organization". By the mid-1980s, "al-Qaeda" was only a database in a computer linked to the communications department of the secretariat of the Islamic Conference. At the time, when Osama bin Laden was nothing but a proxy US agent operating in Peshawar, al-Qaeda's intranet was a good communication system for fighters to exchange code messages. "al-Qaeda" was neither a terrorist organization - an Islamist army - nor personal property of Osama bin Laden.

This is the month when the future of the eurozone will be decided. This week, Greek leaders will meet with European officials to discuss what comes next for Greece. The new prime minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras, has already stated that he will not accept an extension of the current bailout. Officials from other eurozone countries have already said that they expect Greece to fully honor the terms of the current agreement. So basically we are watching a giant game of financial "chicken" play out over in Europe, and a showdown is looming. Adding to the drama is the fact that the Greek government is rapidly running out of money. According to the Wall Street Journal, Greece is "on course to run out of money within weeks if it doesn't gain access to additional funds, effectively daring Germany and its other European creditors to let it fail and stumble out of the euro." We have witnessed other moments of crisis for Greece before, but things are very different this time because the new Greek government is being run by radical leftists that based their entire campaign on ending the austerity that has been imposed on Greece by the rest of Europe. If they buckle under the demands of the European financial lords, their credibility will be gone and Syriza will essentially be finished in Greek politics. But if they don't compromise, Greece could be forced to leave the eurozone and we could potentially be facing the equivalent of "financial armageddon" in Europe. If nobody flinches, the eurozone will fall to pieces, the euro will collapse and trillions upon trillions of dollars in derivatives will be in jeopardy.

According to the Bank for International Settlements, 26.45 trillion dollars in currency derivatives are directly tied to the value of the euro.

Let that number sink in for a moment.

To give you some perspective, keep in mind that the U.S. government spends a total of less than 4 trillion dollars a year.

The entire U.S. national debt is just a bit above 18 trillion dollars.

So 26 trillion dollars is an amount of money that is almost unimaginable. And of course those are just the derivatives that are directly tied to the euro. Overall, the total global derivatives bubble is more than 700 trillion dollars in size.

"It's a hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it. " (Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN, on the "embargo related" deaths of half a million Iraqi children, 12^thMay 1996.)

"The most traumatized child population on earth." (Professor Magne Raundalen, Centre for Crisis Studies, Bergen, Norway, February 1992.)

Tony Blair was, mind-stretchingly, presented with Save the Children's Global Legacy Award, on 19^th November 2014. His acceptance speech included that his: "... sense is that amidst all the challenges, and all the misery and deprivation that we seek to conquer and vanquish, there is something hopeful ... something to be thankful for."

Ironically, just two months earlier (15^th August 2014) Save the Children released a Report (1) on the on the trauma amongst Iraq's children in Northern Iraq alone, after eleven years of a Bush-Blair driven illegal invasion and ongoing resultant conflict. Iraq's children, it was clear, had no hope and nothing "to be thankful for."

Yet Blair was lauded by an organization that claims: "We envision a future in which no child will die from preventable causes and where every child has nutritious food and clean water."

Without Blair's claims of fantasy WMDs with which Iraq could wreak annihilation in "45 minutes", a lie quoted by General Colin Powell at the United Nations exactly twelve years ago, 5^th February 2003, for the children of Iraq a genocidal "preventable cause" might have been avoided.

"Nutritious food and clean water", had, of course, been deliberately destroyed on US Central Command's order to bomb all water facilities in Iraq in 1991. Food was poisoned by the use of Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons, contaminating all fauna and flora. DU's "half-life" is 4.5 Billion years. And it is not "depleted."

The contamination nightmare was compounded in orders of magnitude by the further use of DU weapons in 2003, used again by the UK under Blair's government. (2)

Befoulment of air, water and food for infinity condemns future generations of unborn, newborn and developing children in Iraq and the region to a poisoned legacy of cancers and deformities for generations to come. War crimes unequalled in history.

Kiev has failed to provide Moscow with copies of documents, allegedly belonging to Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine, a Russian foreign ministry official told RIA Novosti on Sunday.

Addressing the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko showed off covers of Russian passports and military IDs, claiming they prove "Russian presence" in the conflict-torn East Ukraine.

Moscow then asked Kiev to provide copies of the documents on Saturday evening, as "document covers like the ones shown yesterday can easily be bought on the street market," Viktor Sorokin, head of the Second CIS Department at Russia's foreign ministry, said.

"Currently, there is no real evidence, the Ukrainian side failed to provide copies of these documents," Sorokin said.

I regularly enjoy coffee with two mainstream media editor friends.

Neither will carry my articles because of my 'pro-Russian leanings.' I won't play a part in mainstream media's orchestrated anti-Russian rhetoric. Be proud of me; my candid nature suggests that, in the Euro Weekly News at least, you enjoy a free press.

A fiction usually directed at Russia is that it doesn't have a free Press; rhetoric without substance. Let us instead take a look at the so-called free Press in the West.

William Colby, ex-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a man who should know Western media: "The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

Not long after becoming a whistle-blower Colby died in a freak canoeing accident.

There is no disguising the sinister and insidious nature of CIA tentacles: "In the US 90 per cent of all TV, newspapers, radio, magazines are owned and controlled by six mega corporations. You can't get a word in there that connects to the real world." So says American political analyst Mark Mason.

Former BBC Director-General, Greg Dyke, wrote in his autobiography: "When it came to discussing the war in Iraq, staff found it so difficult to find any member of the public prepared to speak in favour that they ended up planting people in the (Question Time) audience."

German intelligence estimates that the death toll in the southeast of Ukraine has mounted to 50,000 people, ten times the officially announced figure which has repeatedly been cited in the press.

German intelligence estimates that the total number of people who have been killed in Ukraine is almost 50,000, including both civilians and the military, the German media reported on Sunday.

The estimates are ten times higher than the officially released death toll figures. The official data is clearly too low, German intelligence sources told a Frankfurt-based newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Speaking at a Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Ukrainian President Poroshenko said that 1,200 combatants and 5,400 civilians have been killed during the conflict.

Crimea cannot be blamed for seceding from Ukraine - a country in turmoil - and choosing to join Russia, said former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. He also added that Ukraine "is not destined to join the EU."

"We are part of a common civilization with Russia," said Sarkozy, speaking on Saturday at the congress of the Union for a Popular Movement Party (UMP), which the former president heads.

"The interests of the Americans with the Russians are not the interests of Europe and Russia," he said adding that "we do not want the revival of a Cold War between Europe and Russia."

Regarding Crimea's choice to secede from Ukraine when the country was in the midst of political turmoil, Sarkozy noted that the residents of the peninsula cannot be accused for doing so.