Armed Ukrainian men have surrounded Mariupol City Council building. Reports suggest they were deployed to dismantle barricades, but as anti-Kiev activists tried to negotiate, the armed men opened fire.

In footage from the scene, a group of armed men is seen guarding barricades and the building, freed of protesters. They shoot in the air from time to time. As a man approaches them and tries to speak, a military-clad man aims his weapon at the ground and starts shooting, close to the protester's feet.

"The man tried to prevent them from dismantling barricades, military started shooting. First two shot were in the air, the third - in his foot," local "0629" news website reported. It said the man was taken to a hospital.

A crowd of locals gathered outside the building as, they said they heard the shooting. According to media estimates, by 14:00 local time nearly 200 people came to the city council. They chanted anti-government slogans and shouted at police accusing them of letting armed men freely shoot in the city.

Despite popular belief, very few things in our world are exactly what they seem. That which is painted as righteous is often evil. That which is painted as kind is often malicious. That which is painted as simple is often complex. That which is painted as complex often ends up being disturbingly two dimensional. Regardless, if a person is willing to look only at the immediate surface of a thing, he will never understand the content of the thing.

This fact is nowhere more evident than in the growing "tensions" between the elites of the West and the elites of the East over the crisis in Ukraine.

I am continually astonished at the refusal of many otherwise intelligent people to consider the evidence or even the possibility that there is, in reality, no fundamental political or philosophical conflict between the power brokers of the East and the West. As I outlined in great detail in Russia Is Dominated By Global Banks, Too, the truth is they are both working toward the same goal; and both ultimately benefit from an engineered and theatrical display of international brinksmanship.

The day began with the police station and administration building Konstantinovska being overrun; next the airport at Kramatorsk was attacked with rocket propelled grenades and then the mayor of Kharkiv was shot in the back. It ended in a vicious ambush on a demonstration in Donetsk. While America and the European Union impose new sanctions on Russia, violence and turmoil continues unabated in eastern Ukraine.

The attempted murder of Gennady Kernes, the mayor of the country's second-largest city, raised fears that prominent public figures were being targeted for assassination. Last night he was "fighting for his life", said his spokesman, after emergency surgery, with blame for the shooting leveled at both the Kremlin and extreme right wing groups.

Mr Kernes, a colourful character who regularly posted photographs of himself on social media taking part in sporting activities, was gunned down while he was out cycling, jogging, or swimming according to differing accounts of what took place. Valeriy Boyko, the director of Surgery institute in Kiev, where he was being treated, said the mayor "had suffered a very serious wound with a number of organs damaged".

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.