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Merkel childish fury after Gerhard Schroeder backs Putin on Ukraine

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© TelegraphGerhard Schroeder (left) is a personal friend of Vladimir Putin and once described the Russian President as a “flawless democrat” .
Former chancellor says Russia's actions have been misunderstood and should be regarded in their historical context

Germany's former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has embarrassed the government of his successor Angela Merkel by staunchly defending the Kremlin's actions in the Ukraine and claiming that Russia wanted to stay "big and strong" and an equal to the United States.

Mr Schroeder was Germany's Social Democrat leader from 1998 until 2005. He is a personal friend of Vladimir Putin and once described the Russian President as a " flawless democrat". He joined the board of the Russian energy giant Gazprom after losing Germany's 2005 election.

With an outspoken defence of Russia's intervention in the Ukraine, the former German leader has embarrassed Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition government which includes conservatives and his own Social Democrats.

While Mrs Merkel and her government have denounced the Russian intervention as a breach of international law, Mr Schroeder has leapt to the defence of the Russian president.

Binoculars

Flashback Malik Obama linked to Muslim Brotherhood

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© WNDMalik Obama, best man at the wedding of Barack H. Obama, Oct. 3, 1992.
President Obama's half-brother in Kenya could cause the White House more headaches over new evidence linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and establishing that controversial IRS supervisor Lois Lerner signed his tax-exempt approval letter.

Malik Obama's oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood's international investments is one reason for the Obama administration's support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali.

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like "to inform the American people that their president's brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood."

"We will carry out the law, and the Americans will not stop us," she said. "We need to open the files and begin court sessions.

"The Obama administration cannot stop us; they know that they supported terrorism," she continued. "We will open the files so these nations are exposed, to show how they collaborated with [the terrorists]. It is for this reason that the American administration fights us."

Calculator

Russia dismisses sanctions, knows energy needs will weaken EU resolve

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© Bela Szandelszky/APAn employee of the Hungarian Mol Natural Gas Transporting Corp. checks the pressure in the pipeline forwarding Russian natural gas from Ukraine at the gas receiving station in Vecses, about 30 kilometres east of Budapest.
Russia's quick recognition of Crimea as an independent state is risking a second round of more damaging sanctions that could unleash a new Cold War.

On Monday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree to declare Crimea fully independent of Ukraine. The act of defiance came a few hours after the United States and the European Union launched sanctions against about 30 individual Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians for what was described as their role in threatening the security and the borders of Ukraine.

The sanctions, which consisted of travel bans and asset freezes, are the first retaliatory measures against Russia since Ukraine's pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted on Feb. 22, triggering the Russian military intervention in Crimea and Sunday's referendum, in which Crimeans overwhelmingly approved joining Russia.

Canada joined the U.S. and the EU in imposing sanctions on 10 Russian and Ukrainian individuals.

The confrontation - increasingly reminiscent of the mutual hostility between the West and the Soviet Union - seems set to deepen.

"If Russia continues to interfere in Ukraine, we stand ready to impose further sanctions," U.S. President Barack Obama said.

Quenelle - Golden

Best of the Web: Telling it as it is: Washington is the biggest threat to life on Earth

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Washington's plan to seize Ukraine and to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base has come amiss. But as Lenin said, "two steps forward, one step back."

Do you remember all the tough talk coming from John Kerry, the White House Fool, Hilary Clinton, and the lickspittle Merkel about the harsh sanctions that would "badly damage" the Russian economy unless Russia prevented the referendum vote in Crimea? Well, it was all bullshit, more hot air from the White House sock puppet and the lickspittle German chancellor who is a disgrace to the German nation. As the Russians kept telling John Kerry, sanctions on Russia would destroy Europe and do little damage to Russia.

I wish the Russians had kept this to themselves. I was looking forward to the Washington morons destroying NATO by closing down the European economy.

War Whore

Brzezinski Mapped Out the Battle for Ukraine in 1997

Zbigniew Brzezinski
© InconnuZbigniew Brzezinski
Why would the United States run the risk of siding with anti-Semitic, neo-Nazis in Ukraine?

One of the keys may be found by looking back at Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard in which he wrote, "Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire."

Comment: See also : Imperial Hubris: Ukraine as a 'regime change' too far for the American Empire
'Pussy Riot', the U.S. State Department and Economic Shock Therapy


Quenelle

Hypocritical 'Stephen Harper Regime' joins U.S. with silly sanctions on Russia, warns of more‏

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© UnknownThe Right Honourable Stephen Harper, in a show of solidarity with his buddies in Kiev?
Canada is joining the European Union and the U.S. in slapping additional sanctions on those it blames for threatening Ukraine's sovereignty, retaliating against what Prime Minister Stephen Harper has branded the "Putin regime."

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Monday recognizing Crimea as a sovereign state after the Ukrainian region declared itself independent and applied to join Russia following a weekend referendum. The decree, which took effect immediately, says Moscow's recognition of Crimea as independent is based on "the will of the people of Crimea".

Ahead of a Monday afternoon meeting with Ukraine's ambassador to Canada, Mr. Harper once again condemned Sunday's referendum in the breakaway region, calling the move a "dangerous escalation" of the already tense situation in the southern, mostly Russian-speaking region.

Without going into detail, the Prime Minister said the government is going ahead with additional sanctions - economic and travel - on "various senior people in Russia and Ukraine, in Crimea specifically."

USA

Best of the Web: The world psychiatrist on the "madness" of President Putin

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© Juliette Bates

Of all the various interpretations Western leaders and commentators have offered for why the president of the Russian Federation has responded the way he has to the events in Ukraine over the course of February and March of 2014 - in refusing to acquiesce to the installation of a neo-fascist regime in Kiev, and in upholding the right of Crimea to self-determination - the most striking and illuminating interpretation is that he has gone mad. Striking and illuminating, that is, something in the West itself.

In times past, the international landscape reflected a multipolar order, a multiplicity of competing ideologies, alternative schemes of social and economic organization. Back then the actions of another country could be understood in terms of its alternative ideology. Even extreme figures - Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot - calling them crazy was an example of hyperbole, an intensified way of describing the brazenness with which they pursued their rationally set political goals. But when Chancellor Angela Merkel asks whether Putin is living "in another world," echoing a theme in the narrative presented by Western media, the question seems to imply something quite literal.

TV

Western media's reporting on Ukraine is as terrible as it was on Iraq

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© Unknown
As the Ukraine crisis continues to deepen, the mainstream U.S. news media is sinking to new lows of propaganda and incompetence. Somehow, a violent neo-Nazi-spearheaded putsch overthrowing a democratically elected president was refashioned into a "legitimate" regime, then the "interim" government and now simply "Ukraine."

The Washington Post's screaming headline on Sunday is "Ukraine decries Russian 'invasion,'" treating the coup regime in Kiev as if it speaks for the entire country when it clearly speaks for only a subset of the population, mostly from western Ukraine. The regime's "legitimacy" comes not from a democratic election but from a coup that was quickly embraced by the U.S. government and the European Union.

Bomb

Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela and beyond: Beware the wars of March

In the 1930s it was a notorious fact the German government of Adolf Hitler chose the month of March to perpetrate its most daring moves in reasserting the nation as a continental power, culminating in the most deadly war in history.

For example:

March 1933:
German federal election brings Hitler to power as chancellor

March 1936:
Germany remilitarizes the Rhineland in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles

March 1937:
The Third Reich's Condor Legion bombs and attacks Durango, Spain and the next month bombs Guernica

March 1938:
Germany absorbs Austria

Over the past fifteen years a not dissimilar pattern has emerged.

Top Secret

CIA-Senate dispute 101: Who's spying on whom?

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© Gary Cameron/Reuters
Did the Central Intelligence Agency spy illegally on Senate Intelligence Committee computers?

That's what Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California charged Tuesday in an extraordinary Senate floor speech. The CIA has denied wrongdoing and has its own questions about how Intelligence Committee staffers turned up a sensitive internal report on the agency's past use of harsh interrogation techniques.

Here are nine questions and answers about a complex story that starts with waterboarding and ends in a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia.

1. What's the background?

The CIA began using so-called enhanced interrogation techniques on terror suspects at black sites around the world in 2002. These included use of waterboarding to simulate drowning, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.

Following a series of news reports detailing this activity, the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2009 authorized a comprehensive review of the program. While panel lawmakers had been informed of the program by agency briefers, a preliminary staff inquiry showed that the interrogations were harsher than they had been described, according to Senator Feinstein, the committee chairman. The panel was also concerned about the CIA's destruction of some videotapes of interrogations, seeing it as possible destruction of evidence.