● Russia's President Vladimir Putin will discuss the 2013-2018 plan for the activities of MinVostokRazvitiye (Ministry for the Development of the Far East) and fine tuning of the State Program "The Socio-Economic Development of the Far East and Baikal Region" with government members on Wednesday, the Kremlin press service reported. ● "Those present at the meeting will also review the elimination of the aftermath of (last year's) large-scale floods hitting the areas of the Republic of Yakutia (Sakha), Primorsky and Khabarovsk Territories, Amur and Magadan Regions, and the Jewish Autonomous Region," the Kremlin press service points out. ● Yuri Trutnev, Vice-Premier and plenipotentiary presidential representative in the Far Eastern Federal District, will make a report on the subject. Upon being appointed to the position last year, Trutnev set himself a task of forming main development institutions in the District as soon as possible organizations which would engage in attracting investors, in developing the territories and fostering human capital.

Pepe Escobar: Asia will not 'isolate' Russia ■ Any (bureaucratic) doubts the New Cold War is on have been dispelled by the Group of Seven issuing a pompous, self-described Hague Declaration. Abandon all hope those who expected The Hague to become the seat of a tribunal judging the war crimes of the Cheney regime. The G-7 also cancelled its upcoming summer summit in Sochi as a means of "punishing" Moscow over Crimea. As if this carried any practical value. [...] All this in the sidelines of a supposed summit on nuclear security in the Netherlands, where US President Barack Obama, at the Rijksmuseum, in front of Rembrandt's The Night Watch, extolled Washington's "support of the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian people". Rembrandt's watchers have never seen anything like it in their glorious lifespan. It pays to be a Nazi after all; you just need to be in the right government, against the right enemy, and fully approved by the hyper-power.

Under Czar Nicholas II, blue and green got introduced to the palette. In 1909, Nicholas authorized Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii to document his empire using a new technique called additive color. Over a period of about six years, Prokudin-Gorskii took some 10,000 pictures, systematically chronicling Russia’s rich culture, industry, and architecture. His stunning photos capture the breadth of life in the last days of an empire, its rugged frontiers and rural landscapes, and the signs of its growing industrial might. They were meant to be presented as “optical color projections” to the nation’s school children, to expose them to the dazzling diversity of Russian life they wouldn’t otherwise see. The images offer a rare glimpse of pre-revolutionary Russia, in color so vivid it’s easy to forget they’re a century old.

They operate on the now familiar principle that a wide range of colors can be reproduced by combining monochrome exposures in red, green, and blue. To achieve this, Prokudin-Gorskii used three oblong glass plates to snap black and white slides in quick bursts through colored filters. James Clerk Maxwellin first proposed the technique in the mid 1800s, and it’s still used today in many televisions and computer monitors.

[Kick-starting World War III:] A private military company will be in charge of suppressing protest movements in Eastern Ukraine, said a source in the country's Security Service. According to him, the name of the company is Greystone Limited. According to a source cited by ITAR-TASS, Ukrainian authorities believe that the Security Service is not able to suppress the protest mood and neutralize the leaders and activists of the pro-Russian movement in the eastern regions. According to publicly available information Greystone Limited is a structural part of Blackwater, that was later renamed into Academi [formerly Xe Services/Blackwater USA]. According to military experts, the company is associated with the CIA and the US Defense Department.

The international community should put pressure on Kiev to make it lift the ban on broadcasts of Russian TV channels in Ukraine, says Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry's commissioner for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. "A Kiev court's decision on suspending broadcasts of four Russian TV channels in Ukraine jeopardizes human rights, including freedom of the media," Dolgov said on Twitter on Wednesday. This step is aimed at "cutting people, including millions of Russian-speaking ones, off from truthful information about the lawlessness of ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists in order to better brainwash them," he said. "The international community, including the OSCE, should put pressure on Kiev to make sure that this punitive measure is canceled," Dolgov said.

G. Murphy Donovan: Whatever you believe or say about Putin or Russia, you also have to ask: compared to what? ■ And don’t kid yourself about Ukraine. The issue there is not right or wrong, legitimacy or illegitimacy. Neither side has a sovereignty argument. And the dispute isn’t about democracy or freedom either. The real danger in east Europe is nuclear chicken - a dangerous game with a short fuse. Ukraine has 15 active nuclear reactors. Ukraine dispute has no moral high ground either. US foreign policy folly has done much to undermine personal sovereignty, national sovereignty, and the good name of democracy worldwide. America has been slicing and dicing polities in East Europe, Africa, the Arab world, and elsewhere for decades pretending that the default setting is democracy. Distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate are now arbitrary, in the end, a function of power. And the first democratic election is often the last.

Steve Weissman: Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev ■ The CIA, NSA, and Pentagon likely provided their specialized services, while some of the private contractors exhibited shadowy skill sets. But if McGovern knows the score, as he should, diplomats ran the campaign to destabilize Ukraine and did the hands-on dirty work. Harder for some people to grasp, Ambassador Pyatt and his team did not create the foreign policy, which was – and is – only minimally about overthrowing Ukraine's duly elected government to "promote democracy." Ever since Bill Clinton sat in the Oval Office, Washington and its European allies have worked openly and covertly to extend NATO to the Russian border and Black Sea Fleet, provoking a badly wounded Russian bear. They have also worked to bring Ukraine and its Eastern European neighbors into the neoliberal economy of the West, isolating the Russians rather than trying to bring them into the fold. Except for sporadic resets, anti-Russian has become the new anti-Soviet, and "strategic containment" has been the wonky word for encircling Russia with our military and economic power.

Alex Lantier: US, EU press Russia to recognize Ukraine’s putschist regime ■ Amid US President Barack Obama’s tour of Europe, US and European Union (EU) officials pressed Moscow to recognize the Western-backed Ukrainian regime that emerged from last month’s fascist-led putsch in Kiev. Speaking with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte amid a nuclear summit at The Hague, Obama briefly addressed the Ukraine crisis. Denouncing the March 16 referendum in which Crimea seceded from Ukraine and was annexed to Russia, he said: “We are also concerned about further encroachment by Russia into Ukraine. So what I announced and what the European Council announced was that we were consulting and putting in place the framework, the architecture for additional sanctions, additional costs, should Russia take the next step.” He added, “There is another path available to Russia.

● A stunning report prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) outlining the agenda of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for his meeting today with US Secretary of State John Kerry at the Hague Nuclear Security Summit reveals that President Obama is still in “shock” after being ordered by the Chairman, President, and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation, Rex Tillerson, to allow Russia’s annexation of Crimea or face “immediate domestic political annihilation.” ● According to this report, Tillerson is the head of this giant American multinational oil and gas corporation, headquartered in Irving, Texas, that is a direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and is the world’s third largest company by revenue. ● Important to note, this report continues, is that Exxon Mobil has long charted a course separate from that of the United States government as evidenced by Tillerson’s predecessor, former CEO Lee Raymond, once stating, “I’m not a U.S. company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”

Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts about the Crimean Crisis, the showdown with Vladimir Putin, the Ukraine political situation and the growing conflict between Russia, the European Union and the United States.

A Swedish expert invited by the government to speak at the release of its white paper on Roma discrimination was on Tuesday denied entry to the breakfast room at Stockholm's Sheraton hotel. She had to drink her coffee in the lobby. ● Diana Nyman, the chairman of the Roma Council in Gothenburg, was set to speak at the release of the white paper on discrimination of Roma and travellers in Sweden. The government put her up at the four-star Sheraton Hotel, a stone's throw away from parliament and the government quarter, but when Nyman, 45, went down for breakfast she was offered a modern-day example of the discrimination that the white-paper on Tuesday admitted had been endemic in Sweden. Nyman, who wears a traditional wide black skirt and frilly blouse and who recently fielded questions about beggars in an online chat, said she was almost knocked over by a staff member who rushed to bar the Roma expert and speaker from entering the breakfast room. "Even after I had showed that I'd paid for breakfast the staff insisted that I stay in the lobby," Nyman told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper (DN) on Tuesday. "They got me coffee so I could drink it there instead."

Gregg Easterbrook ■ NCIS and its sibling NCIS: Los Angeles are the top-rated dramas on television, a distinction they have held for several years. Next season there will be a third iteration, which ones hopes will be titled NCIS: Spinoff. As Quartz’s Jason Lynch notes, viewers love these formulaic procedurals—while critics ignore them. But what exactly are so many Americans watching—and rooting for—when they tune in for these TV shows? A closer look reveals that both series are uncomfortably akin to a cheering section for the NSA: The shows depict a world in which terrorists planning mass slaughter are under every bed, in which viewers root for the good-looking, wisecracking agents to smash down doors without warrants; in which super-advanced electronic surveillance is used exclusively to protect the public. In the NCIS version of reality, we’ll all die unless powerful government agencies treat the United States Constitution like a big joke.