A Russian Internet news site Iskra ("Spark") based in Zaporozhye, eastern Ukraine, reported on March 7, that "Ukraine's gold reserves had been hastily airlifted to the United States from Borispol Airport east of Kiev".

This alleged airlift and confiscation of Ukraine's gold reserves by the New York Federal Reserve has not been confirmed by the Western media.

The number of old Etonians in David Cameron's inner circle is 'preposterous', said Education Secretary Michael Gove yesterday.

The dominance of one school in public life did not exist in any other country and its continuation in Britain was 'ridiculous', he argued.

Mr Gove, who is soon to become the first Conservative education chief to send his daughter to a state secondary school, suggested that children should be given the impression that anyone can get to the top.

The outright lies being printed and broadcast in the western press regarding the situation in Ukraine is just the next level from a war on truth begun with the events of 9-11. Since that time the US Government and its subservient media has been pounding the American people with extreme Orwellian propaganda, that pays no attention to the reality of anything, According to Professor Kevin Barret in an interview for the Voice of Russia.

Dr. Barret says that now, for the first time in his lifetime, we are seeing that applied to a non-Muslim country. He calls the demonization of Muslims: Orwellian theater of hate style of propaganda which has now gone completely over-the-top, is hateful, is totally unconcerned with facts and has been turned against Russia.

Hello, this is John Robles. You are listening to an interview with Dr Kevin Barrett, he is a Doctor and a Professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies, and the co-founder of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for Truth. He is also the owner and manager of truthjihad.com. This is part 1 of a longer interview, you can find the rest of this interview on our website at voiceofrussia.com.

Venezuela's foreign minister has slammed US Secretary of State John Kerry for meddling in the internal affairs of the country.

Speaking at a ceremony to honor late President Hugo Chavez in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, on Friday, Elias Jaua said, "We denounce you as an assassin of the Venezuelan people, Mr. Kerry. We are not going to lower our tone before any empire, until you order your lackeys in Venezuela to stop the violence against the people."

"...You encourage the protests in Venezuela and we are going to denounce that in every part of the world."

"You who are so hurt that we speak out, as you said to me in Guatemala, 'You all need to lower your tone.' We will not lower our tone," the Venezuelan foreign minister added.

An attempted radio-electronic attack on Russian television satellites from the territory of Western Ukraine has been recorded by the Ministry of Communications. It comes days after Ukraine blocked Russian TV channels, a move criticized by the OSCE.

The ministry noted that "people who make such decisions" to attack Russian satellites that retransmit TV signals, "should think about the consequences," Ria reports. The ministry did not share any details of the attack.

Earlier this week, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) criticized Kiev's "repressive" move to halt the broadcasting of Russian TV channels after the Ukrainian media watchdog claimed that shutting down TV stations ensured "national security and sovereignty" of Ukraine.

"Banning programming without a legal basis is a form of censorship; national security concerns should not be used at the expense of media freedom," OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatović said.

More than half of Ukraine's population speaks Russian regularly and one third say it's their native tongue. In Crimea over 90 percent of the population uses Russian on an everyday basis.

On Tuesday, a fifteen-year-old Turkish Alevi named Berkin Elvan died, sparking the country's largest anti-government protests since last summer, when a sit-in to save Istanbul's Gezi Park grew into nationwide clashes. Nine months ago, at the height of the Gezi protests, Elvan went out to buy a loaf of bread in his neighborhood, Okmeydani, and was struck on the head with a tear-gas canister. Like many neighborhoods in the city, Okmeydani had been the site of violent daytime clashes between police and protesters, even as families carried on with their normal lives.Elvan fell into a coma, and Okmeydani hospital, where he was treated, quickly turned into a site of vigil and protest. His wide smile and mop of black hair became a symbol of police brutality, while his depleting body weight, for the protesters, was like a ticking clock charting the government's inaction. Even the loaf of white bread he had been sent out to buy took on a totemic significance. When Elvan died, after two hundred and sixty-nine days in a coma, weighing just over thirty pounds, protesters hoisted loaves above their heads like torches.

Much has changed in Turkey since Gezi, which represented an unprecedented challenge to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (A.K. Party). The brutality of the riot police - whose excessive use of tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds was applauded by Erdoğan - exposed a corroding democracy, while the protests themselves revealed the Turkish public's dwindling patience. Erdoğan stayed in power, but the development of Gezi Park, which had sparked the demonstrations, was halted. In December, a corruption investigation that targeted government officials and influential businessmen seemed to signal a bitter rivalry between Erdoğan and his former ally, the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, whose followers within Turkey are said to have significant influence within the police and judiciary, and number some five million worldwide.

An eleventh-hour U.S. effort to resolve the growing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine failed Friday, and Moscow shipped more troops and armor into the flash-point Crimea region ahead of a planned vote on breaking away from Ukraine and rejoining Russia.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry warned against a "backdoor annexation" by Russia of the strategic Black Sea peninsula. But Kerry conceded that six hours of talks here with Russia's top diplomat neither stopped Sunday's vote nor opened a new diplomatic path for Moscow to step back from the Cold War-tinged standoff.

Next month, the trustees who oversee America's most distinguished journalistic award could face their toughest decision in at least four decades.

The issue before the Pulitzer Prize Board: Does it honor reporting by The Washington Post and The Guardian based on stolen government documents that are arguably detrimental to the national security of the United States, and which were provided by a man who many see as a traitor? Or, does it pass over what is widely viewed as the single most significant story of the year - if not the decade - for the sake of playing it safe?

The politically charged debate surrounding the National Security Agency's widespread domestic surveillance program, and the man who revealed it, Edward Snowden, is certain to prompt intense discussion for the 19-member Board as it gathers to decide this year's winners, according to past Board members, veteran journalists and media watchdogs. The debate echoes the historic decision in 1972, when the Board honored The New York Times for its reporting on Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers, they said.

"This is an institutional question for them," said Robert Kaiser, the veteran Washington Post journalist and a previous Pulitzer Prize finalist. "This is a very good argument to have, and there are members of that Board who are going to raise these questions and want to talk about them."

The risks are manifold, and there is no easy answer: Honoring the NSA reporting - particularly in the coveted category of Public Service - would inevitably be perceived as a political act, with the Pulitzer committee invoking its prestige on behalf of one side in a bitter national argument. In effect, it would be a rebuttal to prominent establishment voices in both parties who say that Snowden's revelations, and the decision by journalists to publish them, were the exact opposite of a public service. President Barack Obama has said that Snowden's leaks "could impact our operations in ways that we may not fully understand for years to come." Former Vice President Dick Cheney has called him "a traitor." Snowden, who is living in Russia, is facing three felony charges in a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department.

Yet to pass on the NSA story would be to risk giving the appearance of timidity, siding with the government over the journalists who are trying to hold it accountable and ignoring the most significant disclosure of state secrets in recent memory. It would also look like a willful decision to deny the obvious: No other event has had as dramatic an impact on national and international debates over state surveillance and individual privacy. Last December, in a move that Snowden later described as vindication, a federal district judge ruled that the NSA surveillance Snowden exposed most likely violates the Constitution. Another judge later found the surveillance lawful.

"The stories that came out of this completely changed the agenda on the discussion on privacy and the NSA," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. "There's an enormous public good in that, and it's yet to be proven at all that somehow did great damage to national security."

Judge Andrew Napolitano said Thursday on "Special Report with Bret Baier" that while the number of executive orders President Obama has issued may not outnumber those of his predecessors, the types of actions he has pursued are cause for concern.

"The president of the United States said to 11 million illegal immigrants, 'Hey, do A, B, C, D, and E, and I won't deport you,'" Judge Napolitano, Fox News' senior judicial analyst, said. "Where'd he get A, B, C, D, and E from? He made it up. So instead of enforcing the law, he's telling 11 million people how to avoid obeying the law."

Napolitano said Congress is fed up with presidents taking action without the legislative branch. He said the charge this week from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers may cause lawmakers to demand more control.

"The dramatic change on enough is enough with the spying will cause the Congress, I believe, to begin to take back power it has been ceding to presidents since the New Deal," he said.

A US drone strike in northeast Yemen has killed four suspected Al-Qaeda members, a tribal source said on Tuesday.

Two missiles struck two vehicles late Monday in the Wadi Abida area, east of Sanaa, killing the occupants "who were all Al-Qaeda members," the source said.

Obad Mubarak al-Shabwani and Jaafar al-Shabwani, "both local chiefs of Al-Qaeda," were among the passengers, he said.

The United States military operates all drones flying over Yemen in support of Sanaa's campaign against Al-Qaeda and has killed dozens of militants in a sharply intensified campaign in the past year.

Drone strikes have triggered criticism from rights activists, who say they have claimed the lives of many innocent civilians.