They apparently intercepted a telephone conversations between Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union, which clearly shows that the Europeans knew that the snipers on the Maidan square were not sent by Yanukovich but by the insurgents [8:22 mark]. Now let's see what the Western media does with this info. Nice sound quality too :-) The Saker

"There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition," Paet said during the conversation.
"I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh," Ashton answered.

Officers of Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) loyal to the ousted President Viktor Yanukovich have hacked phones of Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Paet and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton and leaked their conversation to the web. The officials discuss their impressions of what's happening in the country after the revolution. The gist of it is that Ukrainian people have no trust in any of the leaders of Maidan. However the most striking thing of all is the fact which concerns the use of force during the revolution, particularly the snipers who killed both protesters and officers of the riot police. Mr. Paet reveals astonishing information which confirms the rumours that the snipers were employed by the leaders of Maidan. (Video)

RT.com: Kiev snipers hired by Maidan leaders - leaked EU's Ashton phone tape
Secretive Neo-Nazi Military Organization Involved in Euromaidan Sniper Shootings

Instead of the Obama Administration trying to sit down with President Putin and negotiate a way out of this in good faith, all the signs are that the Obama Administration is going to try to cement Victoria Nuland's neo-nazi gang of thugs in Kiev into power, according to US based Professor Francis Boyle. He says the OSCE (The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), NATO and the EU all support the US/CIA "project" as he called it. Professor Boyle says it is appalling that the EU stated that Nuland's neo-nazi thugs in Kiev "reflect European values" and that there is an enormous amount of war propaganda and disinformation being put out including by Zbignew Brzezinskiyand his "pet poodle" Madeleine Albright who continue to attempt to demonize irrationally Russia.

Cameron's adviser Hugh Powell left file on display to photographers. The document revealed [that] Britain will not impose sanctions against Russia [and] will not support military action against the country either. Also disclosed: Russian investors will not be frozen out of City of London. Hague and Cameron claimed today they would 'get tough' with Russia. ● Britain will not impose sanctions or support military action against Russia, according to a briefing paper that was revealed in error yesterday. The document became public when one of David Cameron’s advisers left it on display to press photographers before a Downing Street meeting. The blunder by Hugh Powell, who is deputy national security adviser, also shows that the Government has no plans to freeze Russian investors out of the City of London. Instead, the briefing paper recommends that the UN should take the lead and possibly send monitors to Ukraine. The document says: ‘UK should not support for now, trade sanctions...or close London’s financial centre to Russians.’

And the Noble Prize for Lying and Hypocrisy Goes to...John Kerry with his speech in Kiev gets a nomination. So many to nominate, so little time. - The US has started wars, sent troops into other countries, carried out bombing campaigns and overtly and covertly overthrown foreign governments, or tried to, so many times since World War II that it's difficult to keep up with the numbers. How many of these interventions were for legitimate national security concerns? None. If you run across a jingoist hypocrite badmouthing Russia's incursion into the Crimea, the following links and information are reminders that may be helpful in putting them in their pace. It is not un-American to point these things out but it is being pro-criminal to condone and approve them.

Lasha Darkmoon: Ukraine Crisis Could Spark World War Three ■ John Kerry has appeared on the Sunday morning political show “Face the Nation,” on CBS. He said: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext.” This from the representative of a country that invaded Iraq on a “trumped up pretext”, and, according to Willian Blum in his classic exposé “Killing Hope”, has toppled 77 legitimate governments, beginning with the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. The US moreover is a country that, according to Chomsky, has managed to murder roughly 55 million people since 1945. “It’s an incredible act of aggression,” Kerry noted hypocritically, laying on the double standards thick. “It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country. Russia is in violation of the sovereignty of Ukraine. Russia is in violation of its international obligations.”
Barry Grey & David North: US imperialism, Ukraine and the danger of World War III ■ Are we standing on the brink of a nuclear war? That is the question that everyone should be asking. The US-backed coup in Ukraine has triggered the most dangerous international crisis since the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. American and European officials are denouncing Russia for sending troops into Crimea in response to the installation of an anti-Russian regime in Ukraine that has seized power through a coup d’état staged by fascist militia. The Obama administration appears determined to escalate the confrontation with Moscow.
Chris Marsden: US threatens Russia as Ukraine crisis escalates ■ US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry issued bellicose statements directed against Russia on Tuesday, one week after right-wing putsch backed by the US and European powers brought down the Ukrainian government. [...] Though it is difficult to predict precisely how events will unfold in the Ukraine over the coming days, the trajectory of developments is clear. The US is making a political, economic and military push against Russia that has brought Ukraine to the brink of civil war and which threatens a far broader conflict.

In Kiev, an Israeli army vet led a street-fighting unit
Secretive Neo-Nazi Military Organization Involved in Euromaidan Sniper Shootings
Deaths In Other Nations Since WW II Due To Us Interventions
A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present
US Bombing campaigns since 1945
America’s Staggering Hypocrisy
Vinyard of the Saker: Ukrainian nationalism - its roots and nature (Part 2 + 3)

The head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service has blamed the US-led NATO forces for the surge in Afghanistan's drug production. On Wednesday, Russia’s drugs tsar accused the US and its NATO allies of helping a surge in Afghanistan's heroin production. Viktor Ivanov from the Russian Drug Control Service says NATO forces are directly responsible for a boost in narcotic cultivations in Afghanistan. He also noted that US-led troops have in fact helped create a catastrophic surge, while refusing to check on farmers there.

Alfred W. McCoy: Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State?

The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned. The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency. The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

Neil Clark ■ Genuine people’s power is on the retreat in Europe, and it's under attack from those who most loudly claim to be “democrats.” Last week we saw the unelected EU foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton, meeting the new unelected Ukrainian “president,” Aleksandr Turchynov, who came to power following a violent overthrow of that country's democratically elected president – with the rebellion backed by the EU. The hailing of a foreign-backed coup d’état in a country where fresh elections were only 12 months away as a “victory for democracy” was truly Orwellian. The wishes of the 2 million people who marched against the Iraq war in London in February 2003 were arrogantly dismissed, but the protesters in Maidan, though far fewer in number, simply had to have their way. Ukraine, though a dramatic example, is not the only European country where democracy has been suspended in recent years.

A California couple who found a stash of buried gold coins valued at $10 million may not be so lucky after all. The coins may have been stolen from the U.S. Mint in 1900 and thus be the property of the government, according to a published report. ● The San Francisco Chronicle's website reported that a search of the Haithi Trust Digital Library provided by Northern California fishing guide Jack Trout, who is also a historian and collector of rare coins, turned up the news of the theft. The California couple, who have not been identified, spotted the edge of an old can on a path they had hiked many times before several months ago. Poking at the can was the first step in uncovering a buried treasure of rare coins estimated to be worth $10 million. "It was like finding a hot potato," the couple told coin expert Don Kagin from Kagin's, Inc. The couple hired the president of Kagin's, Inc. and Holabird-Kagin Americana, a western Americana dealer and auctioneer, to represent them. The coins are mostly uncirculated and in mint condition, and they add up in face value to $27,000. "Those two facts are a match of the gold heist in 1900 from the San Francisco Mint," the newspaper reported. Jack Trout told the paper that an 1866 Liberty $20 gold piece without the words "In God We Trust" was part of the buried stash, and the coin may fetch over $1 million at auction because it's so rare.

Glenn Greenwald ■ The vast bulk of the commentary issuing from American commentators about the Russian military action in Ukraine involves condemning exactly that which they routinely advocate and which the U.S. itself routinely does. So suffocating is the resulting stench that those who played leading roles in selling the public the attack on Iraq and who are still unrepentant about it, such as David “Axis of Evil/The Right Man” Frum, have actually become the leading media voices condemning Russia on the ground that it is wrong to invade sovereign countries; Frum thus has no trouble saying things like this with an apparently straight face: “If Russia acts the outlaw nation, can it be expected to be treated as anything but an outlaw?”