Standard & Poor's believes that Western banks will attempt to exit Ukraine completely, while winding down their involvement in Russia until such a time as geopolitical tensions are reduced.

The continuation of "unfavorable conditions" in Russia and Ukraine means that Western banks are likely to try and exit the latter market and reduce the volume of operations in the former, according to a new report from the international rating agency Standard & Poor's.

The agency suggests that foreign banks are "reviewing their development strategy options in Russia and Ukraine", as the banking sector in both countries will likely take several years to recover from their recent decline, said Natalia Yalovskaya, a credit analyst at Standard & Poor's.

"Given the challenging operating environment, we estimate the growth prospects of the banking sector, and improving the quality of assets and profitability as a rather weak in Russia and even more unfavorable in Ukraine", Yalovskaya said.

S&P doesn't rule out that Western banks will attempt to exit the Ukrainian market altogether, while trying to reduce their presence in Russia. However, the agency notes that withdrawing from Ukraine altogether may be difficult due to a lack of buyers interested in acquiring Western bank's assets in the country.

"In early 2015 the Ukranian government announced it was looking to restructure its commercial debt obligations in foreign currency. In accordance with our criteria, we will classify the exchange offer of securities or other similar restructuring of Ukraine's debt in foreign currency as the equivalent of a default," the agency said.

The 2016 presidential election is still over a year away, but potential Republican Party nominee Sen. Lindsey Graham(R-South Carolina) wants GOP voters to know what's in store if he wins the White House: more war.

Graham, one of the more recent and mainstream members of the Republican Party to toss their hat in next year's race, told Fox News during an interview this week that he has a much different idea for tackling the so-called Islamic State than President Barack Obama.

While the Obama administration is adamant about maintaining a policy against the terrorist group - also known as ISIS, or ISIL - that doesn't involve boots on the ground, Graham said he wouldn't hesitate to send American troops to the Middle East.

"I'm trying to tell the American people, the Republican primary voter: The only way I know to defend this country is to send some of us back to Iraq and eventually to Syria to dig these guys out of the ground, destroy the caliphate, kill as any of them as you can, hold territory and help people over there help themselves," Graham said during an interview on Thursday morning that was first spotted by Mediaite.

An investigation has found that the American Red Cross wasted $500 million in its bid to help Haiti, underperformed in its programs, and then tried to cover it up. Despite the NGO's celebrated success, insider accounts point to failures.

When a devastating earthquake struck the Western hemisphere's poorest country in 2010, the American Red Cross was one of the organizations at the forefront of the humanitarian effort to rebuild it a year later, launching a multi-million-dollar effort.

The main program - LAMIKA (a Creole acronym for 'A Better Life in My Neighborhood') - was to build hundreds of permanent homes to house some 130,000 people living in abject poverty after the quake.

Since the launch of Doi Moi (Renovation) in 1986, Vietnam has leapfrogged from a centrally planned economy to a market-driven one and has undertaken comprehensive reforms to make the economy market-friendly. The various market-oriented reforms have helped encourage competition among economic units, which have helped boost the nation's gross national wealth. There were three thrust areas where the reforms were focussed: improvement of institutions with enabling motives, stabilisation of macroeconomic situations and pro-active integration into the regional and world economy.

In a world of increasing economic interdependence, the economies of nations are so closely interlinked that any adverse development in one country can have crippling effect on other nations. This calls for constant coordination of policies that serve the common goals - that is fostering economic prosperity across nations and beyond boundaries. The regional and international organisations dealing with economic issues also help in mitigating contending issues when they arise.

Besides, there is a flurry of bilateral and institutional arrangements across continents that also facilitate economic integration process. In this, Vietnam is a front runner in becoming proactive in fostering international economic integration and enhanced all available opportunities to boost external trade. Besides signing bilateral trade agreements, Vietnam joined the Association of South East Asian nations (ASEAN) and the associated Free Trade Area (AFTA) in 1995. In 1998, it joined the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Since 2000, Vietnam has accelerated the economic integration process and entered into the most comprehensive bilateral trade arrangement with the US, before entering into various multilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) within the ASEAN framework such as ASEAN-China FTA, ASEAN-Korea FTA, ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand FTA, ASEAN-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership, ASEAN-India FTA. In 2007, it became a member of the World Trade Organisation. These however did not complete Vietnam's economic integration process.

Predictably and right on cue, as the date of the review of the EU's sanctions on Russia approaches, there is a major spike in the fighting in eastern Ukraine.

This will come as a surprise to no one.

As we have repeatedly said, the Ukrainians are not genuinely interested in implementing the terms of the Minsk Memorandum.

Those terms, if implemented, would spell the end of the Maidan project. Not surprisingly the Ukrainian government, which owes its entire existence to the Maidan project, will not willingly let it fail and will turn to war to prevent it doing so.

For months, both sides of the Ukrainian conflict were accusing each other of violating the Minsk peace agreements. Turns out it was Kiev-led troops who were not sticking to the ceasefire plan, having their heavy artillery stationed near the border with the Donbass republics.

Ukrainian hacktivist group CyberBerkut hacked into the emails of Major-General Andriy Taran, Chief of the Joint Centre for Ceasefire Control and Coordination in Ukraine, and recovered pictures that prove multiple violations of the Minsk peace agreements by Kiev forces.

According to the Minsk agreements, both sides of the Ukrainian conflict — Donbass militia and Kiev troops — agreed to back their heavy artillery from the line of contact.

However, satellite images obtained by CyberBerkut reveal that Kiev had its heavy artillery stationed in the immediate vicinity of the border with the Donbass republics, thus violating the terms of the ceasefire agreement.

As Washington continues to escalate dangerous tensions with China in the South China Sea, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III is currently in Japan. Both Manila and Tokyo are playing crucial roles in Washington's ratcheting up of military pressure on Beijing.

The Philippines, under the Aquino administration, has been particularly provocative. Last year, Manila filed a legal case before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which was drawn up by lawyers in Washington, disputing China's territorial claims in the South China Sea. When Washington last month staged a fly-by of Chinese occupied territory using a P8 Poseidon surveillance jet with a CNN camera crew on board, an action denounced by Beijing, Aquino announced that Manila would also have flights transit the same region.

On June 1, speaking before a gathering of Japanese businessmen in Tokyo, Aquino compared Beijing's actions to those of Nazi Germany, repeating almost verbatim the inflammatory rhetoric he previously used in February 2014 in an exclusive interview with the New York Times. He stated that, like Hitler, there was a need to stop China, but with Hitler, "unfortunately, up to the annexation of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, the annexation of the entire country of Czechoslovakia, nobody said stop."

China is not an imperialist power, nor is it threatening to invade anyone. The analogy to Nazi Germany in 1938 could be far more aptly made with regard to the United States. Under the Obama administration, it has deliberately pursued an aggressive policy toward China in the pursuit of its own geopolitical interests, threatening a catastrophic war.

In the wake of the USA Freedom Act - the bill which seemingly reigned in the NSA's spying capabilities being signed into law - newly disclosed Edward Snowden documents reveal that the legislation didn't even come close to addressing the agency's warrantless Internet surveillance, secretly expanded under President Obama.

The Freedom Act, signed into law by the president on Tuesday, was heralded as the first major reform of US intelligence practices in decades. While supporters insisted it placed restrictions on the government's ability to collect bulk metadata, it actually extends the surveillance powers of the National Security Agency which had already expired.

But even if the Freedom Act accomplished what its backers claimed, it still fell drastically short of limiting the agency's domestic — and warrantless — Internet surveillance program, newly revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Preface: It's been less than a month since we last posted on this topic ... but, sadly, we've got many more examples.

The Cop Is On the Take

Government corruption has become rampant:

• Senior SEC employees spent up to 8 hours a day surfing porn sites instead of cracking down on financial crimes

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission workers watch porn instead of cracking down on unsafe conditions at nuclear plants

• An EPA employee who downloaded 7,000 porn files, then spent 2-6 hours each workdaywatching porn. He's been doing it for years ... but the EPA never fired him. Another EPA employeeharassed 16 women co-workers ... and then was promoted to a higher-paying job with more responsibility, where he harassed more women

• NSA spies pass around homemade sexual videos and pictures they've collected from spying on the American people

• NSA employees have also been caught using their mass surveillance powers to spy on love interests, such as girlfriends, obsessions or former wives ... and to eavesdrop on American soldiers' intimate conversations with their wives back home. And see this ("routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted" ... "'Hey, check this out ... there's good phone sex'")

Latest horrible ceasefire violations in Donbass by the Kiev's regime are likely intended to demonstrate the "inefficiency" of the OSCE mission to its Western patrons and are evidence of Ukraine's attempts to circumvent the jurisdiction of the Minsk truce co-brokered by Russia, Germany, and France.

Indeed, Minsk-2 is very inconvenient for Poroshenko, because it documents for the first time the need for direct dialog between Kiev and the Donbass. And they need to discuss more than just war and peace, because in fact there are a whole range of issues that must be resolved politically, such as the format for local elections, as well as constitutional reform and economic recovery in Ukraine. Minsk-2 undermines the power structure in Ukraine, which after Maidan has been built around nationalist and military mobilization and the persecution of political opponents. There's a good reason why President Poroshenko immediately tried to disavow the agreement as soon as he returned from Minsk. In March 2015 the Verkhovna Rada passed an amendment to the law on the special status of the districts controlled by Donetsk and Luhansk (in violation of the spirit of the Minsk agreement), rather than adopting a new law as Angela Merkel had asked Poroshenko to do. These actions, as well as others that undercut the foundations of the truce, are causing extreme irritation in Berlin and Paris.

It is already clear that Poroshenko's regime is incapable of negotiating. The two Minsk agreements - dating from Sept. 5 and Feb. 12 - would never have been reached had Kiev not suffered military defeats. As soon as Petro Poroshenko won the election on May 25, 2014, Russia and the EU leaders offered to open a dialog with the Donbass militia. At that time there had been no mass casualties or widespread public acrimony. It seemed that Poroshenko, who had been elected to office (albeit without the voters of the Donbass), was capable of listening to the urgings of the leaders in Europe and Russia and begin a peace process. At least his campaign platform offered some hope of that. However, pressure from US officials forced Poroshenko to embrace a military solution. On May 26, 2014, for the first time since WWII, Donetsk was subjected to an air raid, the Donetsk airport was bombed, civilians were killed, and a real war began.