I think that we can all agree that the situation in the Ukraine is one of total chaos.

• Renat Akhmetov, the local oligarch-mobster, had declared that his companies will go on a "warning strike" for 3 hours per day because Akhmetov was angered that the authorities of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) had taken over the control of the railways which resulted in losses for his company.
• One of the officials of the DRP reacted to Akhmetov's threat by declaring that the DRP authorities have begun the process of nationalization of the companies located on the territory of the DRP, in other words, Akhmetov's holdings.
• The military forces of the neo-Nazi junta have begun shelling several cities in eastern Ukraine, destroying several buildings
• The military commander of the DRP forces, Igor Strelkov, has made a poignant and blunt appeal for a much bigger mobilization of men, especially officers, in the volunteer forces defending the DRP against the junta's military.
• Ukrainian death-squads have, yet again, kidnapped a team of Russian reporters, this time of the TV station LifeNews, accusing them of being the "information-component" of a terrorist movement.
• The Russian government has indicated that the military forces, which had been on maneuvers, have returned to their bases. NATO denied that.
• The Russian military has completed the building of a network of pipelines which are now fully supplying Crimea with fresh water.
• The leader of the Ukie Nazis, Yarosh, has announced that if he is elected he would launc a guerrilla war in Crimea.

So, what is really going on?

I think that while it is premature to make grand conclusions and predictions, we can begin by agreeing on a number of basic facts.

Is a new Cold War looming? It seems so. This shouldn't be happening, but it is.

The confusion that followed the end of the old Cold War is one reason why.

That confusion has been a problem for the anti-imperialist left. While the Cold War was on, there was seldom any need to fall back on principles. Then it was easy for right thinking, well-informed people to side with insurgencies fighting imperial domination; that was what common decency required.

This has not been the case in recent years.

The empire's stewards in the Obama administration and in the military-national security state complex are taking full advantage. So are ostensibly independent NGOs.

It is a risky business - made all the riskier by the cluelessness of the principals. On Team Obama, they know not what they do.

At the Fourth Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) that opens May 20 in Shanghai, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will meet with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Among other things, the summit will underscore how rising non-Western powers are playing ever more prominent roles on the global stage. However, Western elites remain stuck in a time warp, wherein the United States and its European partners are the imperial masters of all they survey.

In this regard, it is an interesting coincidence how mainstream Western media outlets consistently produce narratives that are almost indistinguishable from official government statements regarding countries and leaders with dissimilar worldviews from their Western counterparts. For instance, we repeatedly hear about the democratically elected "dictators" in Venezuela, yet we are assured that friendly dictators are "moderate reformers".

Just imagine if the democratically-elected government of Canada had been toppled in a Russian-financed coup, in which far-right extremists and neo-Nazis played a prominent role.

That the new unelected 'government' in Ottawa cancelled the law giving the French language official status, appointed a billionaire oligarch to run Quebec and signed an association agreement with a Russian-led trade bloc.

Just imagine...

If Russia had spent $5 billion on regime change in Canada and then a leading Canadian energy firm had appointed to its board of directors the son of a top Russian government politician.

Just imagine...

If the Syrian government had hosted a meeting in Damascus of the 'Friends of Britain'- a group of countries who supported the violent overthrow of David Cameron's government.

That the Syrian government and its allies gave the anti-government 'rebels' in Britain millions of pounds and other support, and failed to condemn 'rebel' groups when they killed British civilians and bombed schools, hospitals and universities.

That the Syrian Foreign Minister dismissed next year's scheduled general election in the UK as a 'parody of democracy' and said that Cameron must stand down before any elections are held.

Hear my presentation at the very first Hip Hop Summit before Hip Hop got sold out and taken over: If you think COINTELPRO is over, think again. It's on steroids now!! Here's John Potash on the assassination of Tupac Shakur. I had already found evidence of his surveillance, Potash found more! All to keep Hip Hop artists from becoming political and to degenerate into what we see now. -Cynthia McKinney

Egyptian authorities move him from prison cell

Jailed Al-Jazeera journalist Abdullah el-Shamy, who has been on hunger strike in Egypt for more than 100 days, is near to death according to his doctor.

"He has started to have impaired liver and kidney function," said the doctor, Mohamed Osama el-Homsi. "It means that his organs are in danger."

He has lost a third of his body weight. El-Homsi said El-Shamy's condition was life-threatening and he could "die within a few days".

He was moved from his cell in Tora prison to an undisclosed location after his lawyer, Shaaban Saeed, asked the authorities to transfer him to hospital.

Make no mistake: it's been the year of Edward Snowden. Not since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War has a trove of documents revealing the inner workings and thinking of the U.S. government so changed the conversation. In Ellsberg's case, that conversation was transformed only in the United States. Snowden has changed it worldwide. From six-year-olds to Angela Merkel, who hasn't been thinking about the staggering ambitions of the National Security Agency, about its urge to create the first global security state in history and so step beyond even the most fervid dreams of the totalitarian regimes of the last century? And who hasn't been struck by how close the agency has actually come to sweeping up the communications of the whole planet? Technologically speaking, what Snowden revealed to the world -- thanks to journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras -- was a remarkable accomplishment, as well as a nightmare directly out of some dystopian novel.

From exploiting backdoors into the Internet's critical infrastructure and close relationships with the planet's largest tech companies to performing economic espionage and sending spy avatars into video games, the NSA has been relentless in its search for complete global omniscience, even if that is by no means the same thing as omnipotence. It now has the ability to be a hidden part of just about any conversation just about anywhere. Of course, we don't yet know the half of it, since no Edward Snowden has yet stepped forward from the inner precincts of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, or other such outfits in the "U.S. intelligence community." Still, what we do know should take our collective breath away. And we know it all thanks to one young man, hounded across the planet by the U.S. government in an "international manhunt."

Thailand's military leaders declared martial law Tuesday in a surprise move which they say aims to restore peace and order after months of anti-government demonstrations and unrest have left the nation teetering.

Army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha made the announcement on military television at 3:00 a.m. local time and assured the public that even though soldiers will now be in command of public security, order will rule the day. Dozens of people have been killed as a result of the protests since the demonstrations began in November 2013.

"We are concerned this violence could harm the country's security in general. Then, in order to restore law and order to the country, we have declared martial law," Prayuth said, as quoted by Reuters. "I'm asking all those activist groups to stop all activities and cooperate with us in seeking a way out of this crisis."

A decades-long dispute over power has culminated within the past six months with large demonstrations and unrest. The situation escalated earlier in May, when Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was forced from office. Her ouster made way for sitting Prime Minister Niwatthamrong Boonsongphaisan, who said Monday that his administration would not step down.

The opposition demands that the government give way to an unelected administration that would then rewrite the constitution.

Washington -- The European Union is pressing the Obama administration to expand U.S. fracking, offshore oil drilling and natural gas exploration under the terms of a secret negotiation text obtained by The Huffington Post.

The controversial document is an early draft of energy policies that EU negotiators hope to see adopted under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal, which is currently being negotiated. The text was shared with American officials in September. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative declined to comment on the document.

Environmental groups fear the broad language proposed for the deal would eliminate key restrictions on the export of crude oil and natural gas, fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. The document marks the first major bone of contention in the EU deal, amid an outcry from environmentalists over leaked terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a separate pact that the U.S. and 11 Pacific nations are also negotiating.

"Exports of energy goods to the other Party shall be deemed automatically to comply with any conditions and tests foreseen in the Parties' respective legislation for the granting of export licenses," the memo reads, defining "energy goods" as "coal, crude oil, oil products, natural gas, whether liquefied or not, and electrical energy."

The U.S. government treats trade negotiation texts as classified information. Previous leaks concerning the EU deal have focused on lighter topics, including whether American cheesemakers can call their products "feta" or "parmesan."

By encouraging more crude oil and natural gas exports to the EU -- a massive economic force that uses a tremendous amount of global energy -- the proposal could spur more domestic oil and gas drilling and discourage the development of green energy in the EU, dealing a significant blow to efforts to avert climate change. Some environmental and citizens groups also object to the fracking process itself -- in which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, water, and sand is injected into rock formations to release natural gas -- because of concerns that it might affect groundwater supplies.

"Encouraging trade in dirty fossil fuels would mean more dangerous fracking here in the U.S. and would push more climate-disrupting fuels into the European Union," Ilana Solomon, director of the Responsible Trade Program at Sierra Club, told HuffPost. "The oil and gas industry is the only winner in this situation."

North Carolina legislators are considering a bill that would make it a crime to publicly disclose toxic chemicals that energy companies use in the hydraulic fracturing process, with offenders on the hook for fines or even jail time.

Known as the Energy Modernization Act, the bill would make any unauthorized disclosure of fracking trade secrets - including the chemicals used - punishable with a Class I Felony, according to an Energywire report.

Fracking, a gas and oil mining technique which involves injecting a mixture of sand and chemicals deep into the earth, has been blamed for contaminated drinking water, infertility, birth defects, cancer, air pollution, and other serious concerns. Americans opposed to fracking have not only struggled with obstacles put in place by gas and oil companies, but also with the high profits and employment that come to struggling communities along with the process.

Environmentalists have called for more transparency in the conversation over the chemicals used, although gas companies have fought back by saying that their chemicals are a trade secret and thus should be protected. Now, under the parameters of the North Carolina bill, even firefighters and individual healthcare workers could be in trouble if they openly discuss the chemicals that are injected into the ground near their home.

"The felony provision is far stricter than most states' provisions in terms of the penalty for violating trade secrets," Hannah Wiseman, a Florida State University assistant law professor who studies fracking laws, told Mother Jones.

If the bill, which has the backing of the state's top Republicans, is signed into law, major corporations could be given the power to force emergency officials to sign confidentiality agreements, although the penalty for breaking that agreement is unclear.

"I think the only penalties to fire chiefs and doctors, if they talked about it at their annual conference, would be the penalties contained in the confidentiality agreement," Wiseman went on. "But [the bill] is so poorly worded, I cannot confirm that if an emergency responder or fire chief discloses that confidential information, they too would not be subject to a felony."