Militant group says it targeted people who used the 'quenelle' gesture conceived by a Holocaust denier.

French police have arrested six Jews they believe staged vigilante attacks against suspected anti-Semites.

The attacks occurred on December 21 in Lyon and December 22 in nearby Villeurbanne and are believed to have been perpetrated by members of France's Jewish Defense League, or Ligue de Defense Juive (LDJ), the local branch of the militant group associated with the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

The victims were targeted on social networks and tracked down for performing the "quenelle," a gesture conceived by the anti-Semitic comedian and Holocaust denier Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, the Le Progres daily reported.

On Tuesday, LDJ wrote on its Twitter account: "Two major punitive actions were carried out Saturday and Sunday in Lyon against people who performed the quenelle. The little Nazis are no longer at ease!"

Leading Ukraine Opposition figure, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, risks disappointing liberal supporters of his All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" party, having publicly rejected gay marriage at a recent rally.

Yatsenyuk was confronted by a representative of the Western-Ukrainian Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender community who said to him: "Many people live in love, but not in law. Promise me that if you become president, you will legalize same-sex relationships, and I promise that all gays and lesbians will vote for you."

But Yatsenyuk, who leads "Fatherland" in the absence of jailed leader Yulia Tymoshenko, revealed that he rejects gay marriage because his personal beliefs stand in the way of any political position.

"I can tell you about this separately as a Christian and a Greek Catholic," he said. "I do not support gay marriage."

His reply has disappointed the LGBT community in Ukraine, which has looked to the Opposition for accommodation on social issues.

A right-wing nationalist Ukrainian party nominated its leader, who has made public anti-Semitic and xenophobic statements, to run for president.

Some 500 delegates of the Svoboda, or Freedom, political party unanimously endorsed Oleg Tiagnybok at the party's 20th congress on Sunday.

National elections in Ukraine are slated for January.

Support for the party has swelled since recent regional elections, worrying Jewish community and human rights activists. In a March 15 Ternopol regional western Ukrainian legislature election, Svoboda won 35 percent of the vote - more than double the second-place Single Center party and four times more than the parties that make up the Ukrainian ruling coalition.

Svoboda's influence spurred the Lvov regional commission recently to ban a Lvov Jewish charity's screening of the film "Two Tangos," a movie about the Holocaust in Ukraine, for "ethnic incitement."

The violent anti-government street protests that have rocked the Eastern European nation of Ukraine include a smorgasbord of opposition groups and dissenters who strongly object to the rule of President Viktor Yanukovych and the purported influence of Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the nation's affairs. Clashes between rioters and police have already killed at least 25 people and wounded more than 250.

The most controversial element of the anti-government alliance is Svoboda (Freedom), an extreme right-wing political party that not only has representation in parliament, but has been dubbed by its critics as a neo-Nazi organization. Britain's Channel 4 News reported that Svoboda has assumed a "leading role" in the street protests in Kiev, with affiliated paramilitary groups prominently involved in the disturbances. Svoboda flags and banners have been featured in the demonstrations at Kiev's Independence Square. During the continuing street riots, one Svoboda MP, Igor Myroshnychenko, created an iconic moment of sorts when he allegedly helped to topple the statue of Vladimir Lenin outside a government building, followed by its occupation by protesters.

However, despite its extremist rhetoric, Svoboda cannot be called a "fringe" party - indeed, it currently occupies 36 seats in the 450-member Ukrainian parliament, granting it status as the fourth-largest party in the country. Further, Svoboda is linked to other far-right groups across Europe through its membership in the Alliance of European National Movements, which includes the British National Party (BNP) of the United Kingdom and Jobbik, the neo-fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-Roma party of Hungary. The leader of Svoboda, Oleh Tyahnybok, who has appeared at the Kiev protests, has a long history of making inflammatory anti-Semitic statements, including the accusation during a 2004 speech before parliament that Ukraine is controlled by a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia." Miroshnychenko also called the Ukrainian-born American film actress Mila Kunis a "dirty Jewess."

Here is how it works these days: You start hearing about a big, national problem and then it becomes a drumbeat. First there are a few articles and columns mentioning that such-and-such is a problem. Then a number of articles appear, then a "study" from a "think tank" confirms the problem and sounds the alarm about how terrible it is, and then just as the issue seems to be the only thing you are hearing about a solution is presented. Of course, the solution always involves taking something away from you and giving it to some company or industry standing in front of a billionaire or three. The right question to start asking when you hear about these "problems" is which billionaire is driving this.

Here are five-plus examples of billionaires who use their money to try to get us to think what they want us to think in order to enact a right-wing economic agenda.

1) Pete Peterson's deficit/debt scare campaign and his ongoing effort to gut Social Security and other entitlements. Leading every list of billionaires pushing an issue is billionaire Pete Peterson and his forever war on government doing things to make our lives better, especially Social Security. Peterson leads the list because of reports of his pledge to spend $1 billion on his pet issue.

Have you ever heard anywhere that the budget deficit and national debt are a problem? You can't pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on the radio or TV, or listen to any politician from the so-called "center" to the far right without hearing that, and the reason is Pete Peterson and his money.

Peterson and his money are a big part of the backing for the Concord Coalition, Fix the Debt, The Can Kicks Back, the Comeback America Initiative, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Moment of Truth Project, the Committee for Economic Development, America Speaks plus contributions to many other groups. As Michael Hiltzik worded it in Unmasking the most influential billionaire in U.S. politics at the LA Times, "The shame of Washington... comes from the fact that almost every organization promoting the grand fiscal bargain in which those programs will be on the table has accepted, somewhere and somehow, money from Pete Peterson."

Sourcewatch's Fix the Debt portal contains much more information on this big-money influence campaign, including this graphic:
Last week one of Peterson's deficit-scare groups was in the news. The Can Kicks Back is an organization named after the narrative that not cutting Social Security is just kicking the debt can down the road. They claim this is because there is a generational war where older people are living high on the hog and younger people will have to pay for this. The group tries to make legislators think younger people want them to cut Social Security, etc. using astroturf videos, Twitter posts, etc.

Well, the Peterson spigot seems to have dried up. The anti-debt group is... wait for it... in debt. All of that astroturf hype about younger people demanding Social Security cuts? When the Peterson money ran out, the urgency went away.

The U.S. thinks it has found a formula for regime change, beginning with destabilization from within. Venezuela's democratically elected government has long been a target. "Over the last decade or so we have seen this strategy attempted in Zimbabwe, Libya, Iran, and Syria.

The political plan for Venezuela took stage in the streets of Washington DC February 15, 2014. Passers-by on Georgetown's 30th Street on a freezing Saturday were perplexed at the standoff between two groups assuming opposite sides of the street. One ethnically mixed group of mostly Latino, Black, and White had taken the side of the street in front of the Venezuelan Embassy to show solidarity with Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. The group on the other side was the all white, privileged youth of the Venezuelan elite residing in the U.S. who want to see their country's return to the days when they dominated the economic and political process.

The latter are hoping that the recent unrest in their country signals the end of the Bolivarian process and the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late President Hugo Chavez. The protest they staged at the Embassy was to help this become so.

The current situation started in Venezuela February 12, 2014 with violence perpetrated against the democratically elected government and civilians resulting in three deaths, 61 persons wounded and 69 detained. This followed what were, for the most part, peaceful marches marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of La Victoria, in which students played a critical role in a victory against royalist forces during Venezuela's war of independence. Some student groups marched in celebration of the Day of the Student but violent anti-government demonstrators used the occasion to protest episodic shortages of some basic goods, persistent crime, and to demand the release of students who had been arrested in earlier demonstrations.

After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error.

FBI agent Kevin Kelley was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list.

What happened next was the real shame. Instead of admitting to the error, high-ranking President Barack Obama administration officials spent years covering it up. Attorney General Eric Holder, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and a litany of other government officials claimed repeatedly that disclosing the reason Ibrahim was detained, or even acknowledging that she'd been placed on a watch list, would cause serious damage to the U.S. national security. Again and again they asserted the so-called "state secrets privilege" to block the 48-year-old woman's lawsuit, which sought only to clear her name.

Holder went so far as to tell the judge presiding over the case that this assertion of the state secrets privilege was fully in keeping with Obama's much-ballyhooed 2009 executive branch reforms of the privilege, which stated the administration would invoke state secrets sparingly.

They are already sewing your funeral gown, Venezuela. They are now ready to welcome you back to that world of the lobotomized, destroyed nations that are fully submissive to Western political and economic interests - Indonesia, Philippines, Paraguay, Uganda, Kenya, Qatar, Bahrain, and almost the entire Eastern Europe. There are so many places like that - it is impossible to list them all.

They want you back in their deadly embrace; they want you to be corrupt and hopeless, as you were before the "Bolivarian Revolution".

They want you to be the top oil exporter, but with all those horrific slums hanging, like relentless nightmares, over your cities. They want your elites and your military top brass to speak English, to play golf, to drive luxury cars and to commit treason after treason, as they used to commit treason for decades, before your brave predecessor, President Hugo Chavez, began serving and literally saving the poor, in Venezuela and all over Latin America.

Those who are planning to destroy you, those who belong to the so called 'opposition', in their heads, are already portioning you; they are dividing your beautiful body - fighting over which parts should be taken where and by whom. They are arguing which pieces of you should stay at home, and what should be taken abroad - a leg, an arm, and your deep melancholic eyes, the color of the profound pools under the mighty waterfalls of Canaima. They want to sell your jet-black hair, as black as those evenings in the mountains, or like that endless night sky above Ciudad Bolivar.

They want everything, all that is under your skin as well as what is deep inside your body. They want your skin, too, as well as your heart.

Former Texas congressman Ron Paul has announced a petition aiming to secure clemency for Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower who revealed extensive US surveillance programs and ignited a national debate on Americans' privacy.

In a video released Thursday on the Ron Paul Channel, an online network the libertarian started last summer, he calls on supporters to sign the petition in an attempt to bring Snowden home to the US safely before his temporary visa in Russia expires in July.

"Edward Snowden sacrificed his livelihood, citizenship, and freedom by exposing the disturbing scope of the NSA's worldwide spying program," he said. "Thanks to one man's courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them."

Paul worked as a physician before serving in Congress intermittently in the 1970s and 1980s then again from 1997 until 2013. He is best known for his libertarian positions, which often put him at odds with members of the Republican party. Paul has repeatedly lent public support to Snowden since the former NSA contractor came forward to admit he leaked classified documents to journalists affiliated with the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovich and opposition leaders have signed an EU brokered agreement on ending the political crisis in the country.

The Ukrainian opposition representatives included the leader of the UDAR political party, Vitaly Klitschko, the head of the Batkivshchyna opposition party, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and the leader of the nationalist Svoboda opposition party, Oleg Tyagnibok.

The breakthrough agreement was witnessed by EU foreign ministers who brokered the deal, including Poland's Radoslaw Sikorski and Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as well as Director at the Continental Europe Department of the French Foreign Ministry, Eric Fournier.

Russia's Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin, who was present at the negotiations, noted the positive dynamic of the talks.

"We got acquainted with our partners' position, and now we understand it," he said. However, he added that "the biggest difficulty is that the situation is constantly changing" and there is no clarity as to who will fulfill the agreements and how.