Ukrainian troops rode into the town of Kramatorsk in the eastern Donetsk region on Wednesday in armored personnel carriers flying Russian flags in order to penetrate the town, acting leader of the Batkivshchyna party faction in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada (parliament) Sergei Sobolev told reporters in Kiev, a Russian Business Channel-Ukraine correspondent reports.

Earlier, Ukraine's acting Defense Minister Mikhail Koval acknowledged the incident.

"Our troops used a guerrilla-style method to penetrate areas controlled by armed units of the Russian Federation and the separatists financed by Russia. I think that this will be reported within three hours or so and you will realize that it was a breakthrough that enabled our units to advance. That's the official information from the defense minister," Sobolev said.

At around 11:30 am on Wednesday, three APCs flying Russian flags reportedly entered Kramatorsk. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry initially denied those reports.

The Scottish NHS body that approves new drugs is under pressure after it emerged it gave a green light to a new pill for heavy drinkers on the basis of clinical trials funded by the drug's own manufacturer.

The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) approved Nalmefene, licensed by Lundbeck, after assessing the studies and a positive submission by a charity also funded by the pharmaceutical company.

The revelations have raised questions about whether the health body is scrutinising conflicts of interest.

The SMC has the responsibility of considering whether new medicines should be recommended for use in the health service.

Over £1 billion of the NHS budget in Scotland is spent on drugs every year: a hugely lucrative pot for the pharma industry.

The law approved by Congress to grant a one billion dollar loan to Ukraine is only a loan guarantee and will not even dent Ukraine's huge debts, 25 billion of which must be paid this year, William Engdahl, a geopolitical analyst, told RT.

The bill will also give more power to American NGO's to promote democracy in Ukraine, many of the same NGOs that helped create the current instability in Kiev. This is the last thing Ukraine needs at the moment, says Engdahl.

I'm confused. A few weeks ago we were told in the West that people occupying government buildings in Ukraine was a very good thing. These people, we were told by our political leaders and elite media commentators, were 'pro-democracy protestors'.

The US government warned the Ukrainian authorities against using force against these 'pro-democracy protestors' even if, according to the pictures we saw, some of them were neo-Nazis who were throwing Molotov cocktails and other things at the police and smashing up statues and setting fire to buildings.

Now, just a few weeks later, we're told that people occupying government buildings in Ukraine are not 'pro-democracy protestors' but 'terrorists' or 'militants'.

Why was the occupation of government buildings in Ukraine a very good thing in January, but it is a very bad thing in April? Why was the use of force by the authorities against protestors completely unacceptable in January, but acceptable now? I repeat: I'm confused. Can anyone help me?

The anti-government protestors in Ukraine during the winter received visits from several prominent Western politicians, including US Senator John McCain, and Victoria Nuland, from the US State Department, who handed out cookies. But there have been very large anti-government protests in many Western European countries in recent weeks, which have received no such support, either from such figures or from elite Western media commentators. Nor have protestors received free cookies from officials at the US State Department.

Surely if they were so keen on anti-government street protests in Europe, and regarded them as the truest form of 'democracy', McCain and Nuland would also be showing solidarity with street protestors in Madrid, Rome, Athens and Paris? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?

Escalating violence in Eastern Ukraine could be a blow to Russia's economy, with 0 percent growth a possibility according to the Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

In a worst case scenario, the country could see 0 percent growth, the Finance Minister said. At the beginning of the year, the Russian government forecast the economy would grow 2.5 percent in 2014.

"GDP growth is estimated as rather low, 0.5%. Perhaps it will be around zero," the minister said at a government meeting on Tuesday.

Russia's exposure to Ukraine's faltering economy is both direct and indirect. Ukraine's sinking economy is bringing down many Russian companies that have heavily invested in the neighboring market, and geopolitical instability is causing investors to think twice about keeping money in Russia.

Reports out of Moscow indicate that Russia is on the verge of signing the "holy grail" of gas deals with China. The deal between Russian state-owned gas firm Gazprom and Beijing would see as much as 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year flowing through the first proposed Russia-China pipeline by 2018. The agreement has apparently been in the works for years, but recent events on Moscow's western flank (read: the Ukrainian situation) has moved the timetable on the plan up dramatically, with the last sticking point being the price. If the deal is signed next month during Putin's state visit to China, as many analysts are speculating will happen, it will be a significant event not only economically, but geopolitically.

Given the fact that Russia, the world's largest gas producer, and China, the world's largest gas consumer, are neighbors it would be logical to assume that a gas pipeline between the two countries already exists. But logic and geopolitics seldom mix, and tensions between the two formerly communist countries (however one characterizes China's current political and economic system) have remained ever since border disputes brought Moscow and Beijing to the brink of war in the 1960s. Establishing a gas link would thus be a very powerful signal of the growing understanding between the Russian bear and the Chinese dragon that their future lies more with each other than it does with a NATO-backed alliance that is increasingly encircling and isolating them.

U.S. pundits decry countries like Iran as undemocratic for having a screening process for candidates to high office. But U.S. politicians must pass muster with wealthy donors to be considered serious candidates, a system that the Supreme Court just made worse.

On April 2, the U.S. Supreme took another step toward the destruction of campaign finance reform with a five-to-four decision known as McCutcheon v. Federal Elections Commission.

One gets the feeling that this is part of a general campaign, waged by class-biased, ideologically committed conservatives, against government regulation, which they see as somehow a violation of their constitutional rights. As if to suggest that this is so, the Court majority rationalized its decision in the name of "free speech."

What does this ruling do? First, the ruling removes limitations on overall campaign donations given in an election cycle. The wealthy can now sit down and write checks to unlimited numbers of candidates and political organizations and thereby make themselves indispensable in an electoral process dependent on the raising of large sums, particularly for television advertising.

What the financial crisis, subsequent taxpayer bailouts, zero prosecutions of financial industry participants and further consolidation of the economy by oligarchs has taught us more than anything else is that the super rich and politically connected are not allowed to fail.

Apparently, this may also apply to the head of one of the largest firms in what is quickly becoming the most despised "industry" in the nation.

By now, pretty much everyone in America knows about Michael Lewis' book Flash Boys, which exposes the high frequency trading (HFT) industry for the money-sucking parasite it is.

However, what will really get your blood boiling, particularly if you live in Florida, is how the CEO of one of the biggest players in the HFT space, Virtu Financial, is looking for taxpayers to bail-out his poorly performing investment in the Florida Panther NFL hockey franchise.

This takes having "some nerve" to a whole new level of absurdity.

The regime change industry is a scam

The US government's attempt to utilize social media in an effort to subvert the Cuban government dramatizes how and why such efforts are not only doomed to failure, but also why they have nothing whatsoever to do with the cause of liberty. Last month, the Associated Press exposed the provenance of ZunZuneo, a Cuban version of Twitter that was covertly originated, run, and financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a US government agency that supposedly engages in "humanitarian" work around the world - but which has a long history of functioning as a key cog in Washington's regime-change machine.

The plan was to create a platform using non-controversial non-political content - at first - to lure in a substantial audience, and gradually introduce political messages which would create "smart mobs" that would - unknowingly - do Washington's bidding. The key word here is unknowingly - deception was the methodology of these social media "entrepreneurs," who hid the origins of the service using a series of front companies registered in the Cayman Islands. A USAID document cited by AP defined the project as aiming to "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society." In reality, however, the aim was to renegotiate the balance of power between the Cuban government and Washington, giving the latter an advantage in its efforts to manipulate the Cuban people and eventually install a regime more favorable to the US.

That, at least, was the ostensible goal. But if we look at what really happened with this "cockamamie" project - as Sen. Patrick Leahy dubbed it - even this is called into question.

The idea was to set up a text messaging system that would enable Cubans to communicate with one another cheaply. In order to disguise the source of the messages, Creative Associates, described in the AP piece as a "Washington, D.C., for-profit company that has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. contracts," would set up "mirrors" around the world to mask the source. They went to great lengths to disguise the effort as a commercial enterprise, using phony ads to convey that impression and staying away - at least initially - from overtly political messages.

Another company, Mobile Accord, was brought on board to deal with the technical aspects of the project: they began assembling a vast database that, unknown to the thousands of Cuban subscribers, included the "political tendencies" of users as well as their basic information: age, gender, location, "receptiveness," etc.

Yet the founders of the project saw that it was just a matter of time before ZunZuneo was outed as a platform sponsored by the US government. Their solution was to set up a front company that would go "independent," with a CEO at its head who knew nothing of its origins. However, the project would still somehow retain its political character as an element in Washington's regime-change strategy.

The US government's latest report on the Boston Marathon bombing is so full of revealing information buried in plain sight, it seems as if an insider is imploring someone - anyone - to dig deeper. It reads like the work of an unhappy participant in a cover-up.

Properly contextualized, the particulars in the report point to:

• A Boston FBI agent seemingly recruiting and acting as Tamerlan Tsarnaev's control officer, interacting personally with him, preventing on multiple occasions serious investigations of Tsarnaev's activities, and then pleading ignorance to investigators in the most ludicrously improbable manner.

• The likelihood that the blame game between the US and Russia over who knew what, and when, regarding Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his activities, masks a deeper geopolitical game which may very well point to the sine qua non of most such struggles - the battle for the control of precious natural resources.

• The sheer inability of well-meaning US government officials - who either may know or suspect that the "official" account of the Boston bombing, with the Tsarnaev brothers as lone wolf terrorists, is utterly false - to come out and state their true beliefs. The most recent report is an example of the necessity of reading between the lines.