The following script is from "Rigged" which aired on March 30, 2014. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Draggan Mihailovich, producer.

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the current bull market on Wall Street, making it one of the longest and strongest in history. Yet U.S. stock ownership is at a record low and less than half of Americans trust banks and financial services. And in the last two weeks, the New York attorney general and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in Washington have both launched investigations into high-frequency computerized stock trading that now controls more than half the market.

The probes were announced just ahead of a much anticipated book on the subject by best-selling author Michael Lewis called "Flash Boys." In it, Lewis argues that the stock market is now rigged to benefit a group of insiders that have made tens of billions of dollars exploiting computerized trading. The story is told through an unlikely cast of characters who figured out what was going on and have devised a plan to correct it. It could have a huge impact on Wall Street. Tonight, Michael Lewis talks about it for the first time.

Untold story of how activist once aided Mafia probes

When friends and family members gathered recently at the White House for a private celebration of Michelle Obama's 50th birthday, one of the invited partygoers was a former paid FBI Mafia informant.

That same man attended February's state dinner in honor of French President Francois Hollande. He was seated with his girlfriend at a table adjacent to President Barack Obama, who is likely unaware that, according to federal agents, his guest once interacted with members of four of New York City's five organized crime families. He even secretly taped some of those wiseguys using a briefcase that FBI technicians outfitted with a recording device.

The high-profile Obama supporter was also on the dais atop the U.S. Capitol steps last year when the president was sworn in for a second term. He was seated in front of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two rows behind Beyonce and Jay Z, and about 20 feet from Eric Holder, the country's top law enforcement officer. As head of the Department of Justice, Attorney General Holder leads an agency that once reported that Obama's inauguration guest also had La Cosa Nostra contacts beyond Gotham, and engaged in "conversations with LCN members from other parts of the United States."

The former mob snitch has become a regular in the White House, where he has met with the 44th president in the East Room, the Roosevelt Room, and the Oval Office. He has also attended Obama Christmas parties, speeches, policy announcements, and even watched a Super Bowl with the First Family (an evening the man has called "one of the highlights of my life"). During these gatherings, he has mingled with cabinet members, top Obama aides, military leaders, business executives, and members of Congress. His former confederates were a decidedly dicier lot: ex-convicts, extortionists, heroin traffickers, and mob henchmen. The man's surreptitious recordings, FBI records show, aided his government handlers in the successful targeting of powerful Mafia figures with nicknames like Benny Eggs, Chin, Fritzy, Corky, and Baldy Dom.

Later this week, Obama will travel to New York and appear in a Manhattan hotel ballroom at the side of the man whom FBI agents primarily referred to as "CI-7"--short for confidential informant #7--in secret court filings. In those documents, investigators vouched for him as a reliable, productive, and accurate source of information about underworld figures.

The ex-informant has been one of Obama's most unwavering backers, a cheerleader who has nightly bludgeoned the president's Republican opponents in televised broadsides. For his part, Obama has sought the man's counsel, embraced him publicly, and saluted his "commitment to fight injustice and inequality." The president has even commented favorably on his friend's svelte figure, the physical manifestation of a rehabilitation effort that coincided with Obama's ascension to the White House. This radical makeover has brought the man wealth, a daily TV show, bespoke suits, a luxury Upper West Side apartment, and a spot on best seller lists.

Most importantly, he has the ear of the President of the United States, an equally remarkable and perplexing achievement for the former FBI asset known as "CI-7," the Rev. Al Sharpton.

You can't keep a good war criminal down: Tony Blair cannot resist calling for more war every time he opens his mouth.

Iraq would have been engulfed in a civil war like that in Syria if Britain had not invaded it, Tony Blair has claimed.

The Arab Spring - the wave of pro-democracy uprisings - would have spread to Iraq had Saddam Hussein not been toppled by force, triggering a conflict like that in Syria, the former Prime Minister said.

With the Obama administration deporting illegal immigrants at a record pace, the president has said the government is going after "criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community, not after students, not after folks who are here just because they're trying to figure out how to feed their families."

But a New York Times analysis of internal government records shows that since President Obama took office, two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases involve people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all. Twenty percent - or about 394,000 - of the cases involved people convicted of serious crimes, including drug-related offenses, the records show.

Read more at the NY Times

Russia has just dropped another bombshell, announcing not only the de-coupling of its trade from the dollar, but also that its hydrocarbon trade will in the future be carried out in rubles and local currencies of its trading partners - no longer in dollars - see Voice of Russia

Russia's trade in hydrocarbons amounts to about a trillion dollars per year. Other countries, especially the BRICS and BRCIS-associates (BRICSA) may soon follow suit and join forces with Russia, abandoning the 'petro-dollar' as trading unit for oil and gas. This could amount to tens of trillions in loss for demand of petro-dollars per year (US GDP about 17 trillion dollars - December 2013) - leaving an important dent in the US economy would be an understatement.

Added to this is the declaration today by Russia's Press TV - China will re-open the old Silk Road as a new trading route linking Germany, Russia and China, allowing to connect and develop new markets along the road, especially in Central Asia, where this new project will bring economic and political stability, and in Western China provinces,where "New Areas" of development will be created. The first one will be the Lanzhou New Area in China's Northwestern Gansu Province, one of China's poorest regions.

As the US and Europe escalate talks of sanctions, Russia is recommending companies unregister abroad and bring their shares to the Moscow Exchange to protect from possible future sanctions and provide economic security.

"Companies that have listed shares on the New York Stock Exchange, London need to seriously reconsider," Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov told reporters in Moscow on Tuesday.

Sanctions by the West have ramped up over the geopolitical action in Ukraine, and Russian business and politicians have been the target of asset freezes and visa bans.

The government will not force companies to delist and return to Russia, but Shuvalov said the Russian state and the Moscow Exchange will work together to create "attractive conditions" for companies to make the switch.

"This is a question of economic security," the minister said. The US continues to ramp up economic sanctions against Russia, which has spooked investors and resulted in a massive $70 billion outflow of capital since the beginning of 2014, according to Economics Minister Andrei Klepach.

Russian stocks have plummeted over the crisis in Crimea and Ukraine, and are the worst performing stocks worldwide. Since the beginning of the year, stocks have dropped more than 10 percent. Poor performance is also linked to a general trend in emerging markets, which are losing as the US Federal Reserve cuts back its multi-billion dollar bond-buying program.

Russia can't continue to prop up Ukraine's faltering economy, and this responsibility should fall on the US and EU, which have recognized the authorities in Kiev but not yet given one dollar to support the economy, President Putin has said.

"The situation is - to put it kindly, strange. It's known our partners in Europe have recognized the legitimacy of the government in Kiev, yet have done nothing to support Ukraine - not even one dollar or one euro," Putin said at a meeting with government officials at his residence outside of Moscow.

"The Russian Federation doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the authorities in Kiev, but it keeps providing economic support and subsidizing the economy of Ukraine with hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. This situation can't last indefinitely," Putin said.

In December, Russia provided Ukraine with a $3 billion loan, which was a part of a bigger $15 billion aid package agreed the same month. Russia also offered a 33 percent gas price discount that would have saved more than $7.5 billion.

The head of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde said that Russia's loan tranche last year was vital for the collapsing Ukraine economy.

In one of the many frank exchanges U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had in China this week, General Fan Changlong told him how one of his uncles died as a slave in a Japanese mine during World War Two.

Fan, deputy head of China's powerful Central Military Commission, spoke about the lessons of history, signaling Beijing's concerns that the United States was siding with Japan against China.

Hagel replied by saying his own father had helped fight Japanese forces in World War Two.

You go to war with the paintings you have, not the paintings you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Right now the paintings we have are by George W. Bush.

Why do they exist? Why are they being exhibited? How are they being used and discussed? Why do they matter?

I think the simplest answer for why George W. Bush started painting is because he has nothing else to do. Bush is toxic and unemployable as a political figure. He can't campaign for Republicans, can't talk on television about anything important, can't give speeches for money, can't write memoirs, can't travel to certain countries where he runs the hypothetical risk of getting arrested for war crimes. Painting is a harmless and respectable pursuit that offers an aura of cultured acceptability.

As he explained to Jay Leno, the idea of taking up painting comes from Bush's fantasy of being, or being compared to, Winston Churchill. Churchill painted. Of course, Hitler also painted. If painting makes Bush like Churchill, does it make him like Hitler, too? Is either association, when based on painting, more or less outrageous than the other? Painting becomes a rhetorical device, an uncritical excuse for likening Bush to Churchill. This has political ramifications that should not be ignored, yet they almost always are. That's the transformative power of painting.

The US has shown its upmost confidence in Iran's ability to whip up the materials needed to make a nuclear bomb in a mere two months. US Secretary of State John Kerry explained during a Senate hearing yesterday that Iran is very much able to make fissile material essential for a nuclear bomb in just two short months if Iran made the choice to do so. Though, a burning question that is left unanswered is why America has become very confident in the two-month time period.

"I think it's public knowledge today that we're operating with a time period for a so-called 'break-out' of about two months. That's been in the public domain," Kerry said in comments reported by Reuters. The "break-out" duration is the amount of time that would be needed to create fissile material for just a single nuclear weapon in the Islamic Republic of Iran. If the nation decided to produce weapons of mass destruction, Kerry seems confident that it would not take the country too long to execute.