Russia is not going to repeat "The Crimean scenario" in southeastern Ukraine, said the country's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov.

"I think what happened in Crimea turned out to be a big shock for Western partners. They can't tolerate it. And they see the same scenario in southeastern Ukraine," he told Gazeta.ru.

According to Ryabkov, the Kiev authorities should give people from southeastern Ukraine a chance to participate in shaping the future of their own country.

"It's a normal desire [to decide your country's future]. It is the basis of any democratic process," he added.

An executive at Air France used the airline to run a lucrative prostitution ring. The official, who was assisted by his wife, trafficked women from Brazil and subjected them to forced prostitution in trendy areas of Paris, local media reports.

Alain D., the only name the 54 year-old is known by at this time, has been charged on Tuesday with his Brazilian wife, Claudia, 51, and another accomplice, also from Brazil. They stand accused of human trafficking, pimping and organized crime, according to a Saturday report by Le Parisien. The three are now being kept at prisons in Val-de-Marne and Essonne, police sources told the French newspaper.

The business had been generating 2 million euro a year since 2010. Alain D. had managed flight crews at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport, and was in a position to get sizeable discounts on tickets he used to transport women back and forth between France and Brazil, according to vice squad detectives.

Unknown persons overnight destroyed about a million ballots printed for a referendum on independence in the Donetsk Region, local police said on Thursday.

Witnesses said unknown persons broke into a printing house and destroyed 800,000 ballots prepared for a referendum planned for May 11. The attackers also destroyed printing equipment.

A similar incident occurred in another printing house in Donetsk, where unknown people stole about 300,000 ballots and damaged printing equipment.

The attacks were committed by radicals from the Right Sector extremist organization, witnesses said. The attackers were in modern army uniform with yellow and red-and-black bands with Right Sector marks.

There were several groups of attackers, whose aim was to prevent printing of ballots for the referendum, police noted.

Russia's celebrations of the 69th anniversary of the defeat of fascism in World War II come just days after Ukrainian neo-fascists enacted an appalling Odessa massacre. For those who know their history, the graphic symbolism speaks for itself.

And then a geopolitical chess gambit added outright puzzlement to the trademark hypocrisy displayed by the self-proclaimed representatives of "Western civilization".

The gambit comes from - who else - Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is now actively mixing chess moves with Sun Tzu's Art of War and Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. No wonder all those American PR shills, helpless State Department spokespersons and NATOstan generals are clueless.

Unlike the Obama administration's juvenile delinquent school of diplomacy - which wants to "isolate" Putin and Russia - a truce and possible deal in the ongoing Ukrainian tragedy has been negotiated between adults on speaking terms, Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, then discussed and finally announced in a press conference by the president of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Didier Burghalter.

The U.S. State Department released its 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism on April 30th, stating:

With a weak government possessing very few tools to exert control throughout its territory, Libya has become a terrorist safe haven and its transit routes are used by various terrorist groups, notably in the southwest and northeast.

***

Terrorists continue to utilize ancient trade routes across these borders. All of Libya's borders are porous and vulnerable to this activity ....

Why has Libya become a safe haven for terrorists? The State Department's 2012 Country Reports on Terrorism - the first Country Report to list Libya as a terrorist safe haven - explains:

In 2012, Libyan internal security suffered significant challenges and setbacks as it sought to reassert central authority following the fall of the Qadhafi regime ....

And why did the Qadhafi regime fall? Oh, yeah ... in 2011, the U.S. launched a war in Libya and "regime changed" Qadhafi. As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:

We came, we saw, he died.

If anything the past 24 hours have proved, once again, that the US and NATO are opposed to any form of negotiations, confidence-building measures or any other type of negotiations with the Donbass and with Russia. Even though Putin tried really hard to sound accommodating and available for a negotiated solution, the US/NATO policy is clearly to provoke and confront Russia and its allies in every imaginable way. The same goes, of course, for the junta freaks whose forces have acted with special brutality during repressive operations in the city of Mariupol. As for the AngloZionist Empire, it is organizing all sorts of military maneuvers in Poland, the Baltic states and elsewhere. Logically, many of you are coming to the conclusion that a war is becoming a very real possibility and I therefore want to repeat a few things yet again.

First, there is no military option for the AngloZionists in the Ukraine, at least not against Russia. This is primarily due to three fact things: geography, US overreach and politics. Geography, it is much easier for Russia to move a ground forces to the Ukraine than it is for the US/NATO, especially for heavy (mechanized, motor-rifle, armored, tank) units. Second, simply too many US forces are committed elsewhere for the US to have a major war in against Russia in eastern Europe. Third, for the time being the western public is being deceived by the corporate media's reports about the "Russian paper tiger", but as soon as the real fighting starts both Europeans and Americans will suddenly wonder if it is worth dying for the Ukraine. Because if a shooting war between the USA and Russia really begins, we will all be at risk (see below).

Remember how the very same media promised that the poorly equipped, poorly trained, poorly commanded and poorly motivated Russian military could not crack the "tough nut" represented by the NATO-trained Georgian military?

"According to the evidence that I've seen ...Odessa was a giant false flag operation. It... was one of those staged massacres that the pro-Western forces from Bosnia to Kosovo, now Ukraine, excel at staging, intended to draw Russia to overreact and commit military forces ... I believe that the fact that they are willing to stage such a horrendous atrocity shows the depth of their desperation at this point."

- Nebojsa Malic, political analyst, Russia Today

"Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us."

- "Requiem" - Anna Akhmatova

Photos of the victims of the Odessa fire which have been circulating on the Internet have cast doubt on the official version of events. It's now clear that many of the anti-junta activists who occupied the Trade Unions House were neither burned to death nor died of smoke inhalation, but were savagely shot at point-blank range by agents and thugs who had infiltrated the building to kill as many of the occupants as possible, burn the corpses, and then slip away without notice. Some of the victims - like a young woman who was eight months pregnant - were strangled with an electrical chord and left slumped backwards over her desk in a room that shows no sign of fire or smoke damage. In another case, a woman was stripped naked from the waste down, raped, killed, and set ablaze.

While the Obama administration insists that supporting Ukrainian Presidential elections are vital to national interests, some members of the US political elite are questioning the costs of getting involved.

During a two hour House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, the US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland shared her assessment of the US role in Ukraine's crisis and the upcoming presidential election.

But instantaneously she came under fire from Dana Rohrabacher, a republican congressman from California.

"We did have legitimate election before, and the legitimate president was removed after we had major street violence. There were pictures of people running around that we were told were neo-Nazis," Rohrabacher challenged Nuland.

Nuland faced a hard time coming up with answers.

"First of all the vast majority of those who were participating on Maidan were peaceful protesters. There were mothers and grandmothers and veterans," Nuland said, but before being able to continue, Rohrabacher reminded the diplomat of vast presence of violent Ukrainian radicals.

"I saw those pictures and I also saw a lot of people throwing fire bombs at groups of policemen. There were people shooting into the ranks of police. So, yes, there were mothers with flowers, but there were also very dangerous street fighters engaged in those demonstrations. The question is: were there neo-Nazi groups involved?"

The US military hasn't actually been involved in an overt "war", in the traditional sense of a conflict between two mostly equally matched adversaries, since the end of the Korean war in 1953. As Col. Fletcher Prouty points out in his book JFK:The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, US soldiers in Vietnam were mainly fighting against 1 million North Vietnamese villagers who were 'deported' to the South (by the US Navy) where, like any dispossessed people, they resorted to theft to survive. These were the bulk of the 'Viet Cong' that the US military raped, tortured, napalmed and shot en masse. Every other US military and/or CIA 'adventure' from the 1960s until today (and there have been many) has involved one of the following three approaches:

A) a short-lived 'turkey shoot' against an impotent 'enemy' (see Iraq "war" 1, Libya 2011).

B) a protracted direct "war" of colonial expansion waged against an indigenous, largely civilian, population who resist occupation and plunder of their land (see Iraq "war" 2).

C) a 'proxy war', where paramilitary groups (either local or imported) are funded, trained and armed by CIA and US military 'advisers' (too many to list, but see here for a list) and fight local resistance groups on behalf of the USA.

Since the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls, Hillary Clinton has risen to the fore of those demanding international action and calling Nigerian group Boko Haram terrorists.

But during her tenure at the head of the U.S. Department of State, Clinton resisted numerous calls from the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice and a number of U.S. senators and congressmen to do just that.

On Sunday, Clinton tweeted:

Access to education is a basic right & an unconscionable reason to target innocent girls. We must stand up to terrorism. #BringBackOurGirls