Stefan Molyneux ■ What you may find particularly shocking is the conditions under which those forces can be deployed. - First of all, I would assert that it's never ok to use the military to crush internal unrest. Such measures are the hallmark of dictators and failed states. Some people however, might be inclined to justify the use of military force if the stakes are high enough. Trouble is once you open that door, who is to say where that line gets drawn? Well, we don't actually have to ponder that question. The U.S. government has already given us their answer. Unfortunately according to a 2010 Department of Defense document entitled Directive 3025.18, the military is authorized to deploy within the U.S. to quell civil disturbances "when necessary to protect the Federal property or functions." That's very broad, especially considering that the document discusses the conditions under which lethal force may be used. Soldiers are trained to kill. That's what they are good at.

Eric Draitser of StopImperialism.org appears on RT (Friday May 23, 2014) to discuss the elections in Ukraine. He notes that the elections in Ukraine are being contested by entirely unpopular candidates who have not shown any willingeness to engage in serious negotiations with the people of Donbas and Lugansk. He explains that, unless the newly elected government is able to bring the issue to the negotiating table, the horrific attacks on the East will continue.

VoR: Washington Recklessly Risking War in Ukraine: ex-Ass’t Sec of US Treasury (Paul Craig Roberts Interview)
VoR: http://voiceofrussia.com/us/news/2014_05_28/Deepening-Tragedy-in-Ukraine-is-Enormous-Fiasco-for-US-Neo-Cons-8493/Deepening Tragedy in Ukraine is Enormous Fiasco for US Neo-Cons

The 2014 Bilderberg conference will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark from Thursday 29th May to 1st June 2014. About 140 participants from some 22 countries have already confirmed their attendance. These include key and up and coming figures from industry, finance, academia, the military and the media. In addition a number of prominent political leaders will also gather at the Marriot Hotel in Copenhagen, the venue for this year’s meeting.

Official Bilderberg Website: Bilderberg Meetings: Participants

Carl Herman ■ Freedom of the Press Geared Towards Protecting Critics of Government Corruption, Not Government Apologists. || The powers-that-be argue that freedom of the press only applies to large, well-heeled corporate media. [...] The Founding Fathers understood that people who stand up to “oppressive” government officials are to be zealously protected … because “shaming” corrupt, powerful people “into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs” is the only way to preserve liberty, justice and prosperity, and to remain “free and happy”.

A poll about the legitimacy of elected President of Ukraine Petr Poroshenko is doubtful, as residents of eastern Ukraine were not able to fully participate in the voting, a French expert Jacques Sapir believes. ● "The elections took place under difficult conditions in western Ukraine and in the Kiev region. It is obvious that Poroshenko has won the elections. But the elections could not be executed properly in the eastern part of the country. And this raises the question of the legitimacy of Mr. Poroshenko. He is legitimate in the West, but not in the East. And if he wants to be the president of all Ukrainians, he must reach an agreement with the protesters in the east of the country," the expert believes. Answering the question, whether the elections can be called democratic, Sapir noted that, in fact, the conditions of their carrying out were democratic. However, the fact that the presidential campaign was largely financed by Poroshenko and that in some areas of the country candidates for the post of the head of state did not have equal access to the media and could not properly talk about their proposals and themselves, calls democracy into question.

Daniel Patrick Welch: Farcical ’Elections’ in Ukraine
Stephen Lendman: Sham Ukrainian Presidential Election
Gregory Kolyada: Weapons, Prostitutes and Drugs –These are Things Petro Poroshenko is Associated With

Despite dozens of bodies being taken to the morgue in Donetsk, the Ukrainian government is denying that innocent locals are among the casualties in the army operation. The army's supporters in the US also deny that government troops are to blame. RT asked Globalist Research Center analyst, Martin Sieff, why the US is keeping so quiet about the civilian cost of Ukraine's military operation. He said it's because Washington has been caught off guard.

Thomas Gaist & Barry Grey: The bloodbath in Donetsk
Antiwar.com: 100 Eastern Ukrainians Killed in Ukraine’s Airport Offensive
RT.com: Ukrainian people pushed into fratricidal war - FM Lavrov
RT.com: Bodies of anti-Kiev fighters piled in Donetsk morgue - Video

Edward Snowden was trained as a professional spy and actually worked undercover abroad for America’s biggest intelligence agencies, developing their IT security architecture, the whistleblower revealed in an exclusive interview to NBC News. ● "I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden told Brian Williams, anchor on NBC’s on Nightly News. “So when they say I’m a low-level systems administrator, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d say it’s somewhat misleading,” he said. The NBC News pointed out that once Edward Snowden started to leak sensitive information about the methods and scale of NSA global surveillance, the Obama administration tended to speak about him as small fry, a thievish hacker that happened to be a system administrator at the NSA quite by chance.

BBC: Edward Snowden: I was a high-tech spy for the CIA and NSA

There will be no investigation into the alleged mass surveillance of German citizens, nor will there be an investigation into the NSA's alleged spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone, the German federal prosecutor has decided. ● The German federal prosecutor did not find enough evidence to warrant a criminal investigation, German media reported Wednesday, citing sources within the federal prosecutor's office. There will be no investigation into the alleged mass surveillance of German citizens, nor will there be an investigation into the NSA's alleged spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone, the reports said. Documents to terminate the preliminary investigations, which were in the works for months, are ready but not yet signed, according to the reports.

Reuters: Snowden says would have much to tell German inquiry

In a brief appearance in the White House Rose Garden Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced that the US would maintain nearly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan next year despite an official declaration of an end to combat operations. Obama said his plan to keep thousands of US military forces in the country for the next two years was dependent on the reaching of a military cooperation agreement with the incoming president of Afghanistan.

Stephen Lendman: Obama in Afghanistan

Moon of Alabama ■ Thomas Friedman continues to be the most dimwitted foreign policy commentator in U.S. media. Today he claims that Putin "blinked" on Ukraine by not invading it, something the Russian Federation never had any interest to do. But worse than such misreading of current foreign affairs events is Friedman's basic misreading of history. [...] It was the United States that "blinked" in the Cuban Missile Crisis, not the Soviet Union. It was Kennedy who pulled back not Khrushchev.

Paul Joseph Watson ■ Anti-EU revolution, Ukraine crisis threaten to derail global government || The 2014 Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark is taking place amidst a climate of panic for many of the 120 globalists set to attend the secretive confab, with Russia's intransigence on the crisis in Ukraine and the anti-EU revolution sweeping Europe posing a serious threat to the unipolar world order Bilderberg spent over 60 years helping to build.

The US House of Representatives, controlled by a pro-Israel Republican majority [read that again], adopted the National Defense Authorization Act for 2015 that includes the approval of $600 million military aid package for Israel for missile defense. ● The bill authorizes $350.9 million for the Iron Dome rocket defense system, that protects from short and medium-range missiles and rockets, and $268.7 million for David's Sling - providing protection from long-range missiles - and Arrow 3 - that could intercept ballistic missiles before they enter the atmosphere. Both David's Sling and Arrow 3 are missile defense programs developed in cooperation with the United States. The House also voted on an act obligating the president to report to Congress every three months on the status of various Qualitative Military Edge (QME) issues for Israel.

The White House has officially admitted that fake vaccination programs have been used by the United States as a cover for covertly stealing DNA samples from the public as part of the so-called "war on terror." The aim of the scheme, carried out in the Middle East, was to use DNA analysis to identify suspected terrorists who would then be targeted to be killed by the United States. As the New York Times reported in 2011, "In the months before Osama bin Laden was killed, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a phony vaccination program in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as a ruse to obtain DNA evidence from members of Bin Laden's family thought to be holed up in an expansive compound there." "CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organize the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic," reports The Guardian.

Dr. McGowan was being hounded by Zionist fanatics. His crime was publishing this article: What Does ‘Holocaust Denial’ Really Mean? In it, Daniel McGowan asked some uncomfortable questions:

But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm? For most Holocaust revisionists, or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to these three simple contentions: 1. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination. 2. There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich. 3. There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the alleged 55 million who died in WWII.

Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned? More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?

The short version is that rather than an anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish institution in which the particular people killed are randomly chosen this may have been a targeted killing or assassination, possibly tied to the Israeli security services. The big clue is this article by Amir Oren in Ha'aretz. The piece reads very vague. Oren notes the seeming professionalism of the killer, as revealed on surveillance videotapes of the crime. And he notes that the primary victims, Emmanuel and Mira Riva, were Israeli civil servants. Still, it's all very vague and speculative. But as Jeff Goldberg notes in a Facebook post, Oren's article reads like someone trying to say something within the confines of Israeli military censorship.

Richard Silverstein: Brussels Terror Attack and Mossad Connection

Richard Silverstein ■ Yesterday, I broke the story that the Rivas, an Israeli couple murdered in the Brussels Jewish museum terror attack, worked for agencies with connections to Israeli intelligence. Miriam worked for the Mossad and Emanuel for Nativ, a unit that encourages aliyah from Eastern European countries (including Russia). Thanks to reader Bluebird, who discovered that the Israeli embassy website in Germany lists Miriam Riva as an “attache” who worked there since 2007. My Israeli source informed me that they were both accountants. Though I don’t know how diplomatic postings and cover works, I do wonder why an accountant would be classified as an attache. Admittedly, you’d want to protect anyone working for the Mossad by giving them some sort of diplomatic protection. So it might be a pro forma status. Or it could mean that her job as an accountant was yet another form of “cover.”

This full length GRTV documentary produced by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya examines the fictitious land of “Nulandistan” (named after Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland) that has been constructed out of Ukraine. ● It depicts how the realities of crimes against humanity and political oppression involving terrorist mobs are casually replaced by a World of fiction, in which real “Western style democracy” prevails. It deconstructs the rhetoric and propaganda of the Obama Administration and its European allies regarding the crisis in Ukraine and takes a look at their growing frustration towards the Russian media, particularly RT, for challenging their account of events on the ground in what they have declared is an intensifying “information war”. ● The documentary starts with an examination of the EuroMaidan protests that both Washington and the Western media have used to justify the instatement of an unelected self-proclaimed regime in Kiev. The May 2 Odessa Massacre and the political protest movement leading up to the referendums in Donesk and Luhansk in East Ukraine are reviewed. The underlying focus is to show how the reality of events in Ukraine has been been misappropriated and propagandized to support US foreign policy and to justify tensions against Russia.

A lecture (video) by and with Anatol Lieven, of King's College London held on May 14. As usual Lieven, who knows East Europe well, gives a sane realist perspective and accordingly damns the foolish "western" policies with regard to Ukraine and Russia. With about 100 minutes the talk and Q&A is quite long but worth your time. Aside from Ukraine there is an important point Liven makes during the Q&A not with regard to Russia but to China. At 1:25h Lieven talks about false "security guarantees" given by the U.S. and UK, how no one is willing -in the end- to stick to such. This well known fact in general weakens such "guarantees".

Paul Craig Roberts/(RIA Novosti) ■ Last Sunday’s presidential election in Ukraine replaced one Ukrainian oligarch with another, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts told RIA Novosti Tuesday. “The only difference between Poroshenko’s and Yanukovich’s governments is that Poroshenko might choose to ally with Washington and become richer by participating in the West’s looting of Ukraine,” Roberts said. The former treasury official recalled that Poroshenko had even served as a minister in Yanukovich’s government and has been involved in political corruption in Ukraine for years. “Poroshenko’s palace is as sumptuous as Yanukovich’s palace,” Craig noted. “Things have to change in order to remain the same. The Maidan protests were for naught,” the US official said. “Those poor gullible Maidan protesters,” Roberts said. “How much better off Ukraine would be if they had not allowed themselves to be used by Washington.”

Michael Snyder ■ Russia and China have just signed what is being called "the gas deal of the century", and the two countries are discussing moving away from the U.S. dollar and using their own currencies to trade with one another. This has huge implications for the future of the U.S. economy, but the mainstream media in the United States is being strangely quiet about all of this. For example, I searched CNN's website to see if I could find something about this gas deal between Russia and China and I did not find anything. But I did find links to "top stories" entitled "Celebs who went faux red" and "Adorable kid tugs on Obama's ear". Is it any wonder why the mainstream media is dying? If a particular story does not fit their agenda, they will simply ignore it. But the truth is that this new agreement between Russia and China is huge. It could end up fundamentally changing the global financial system, and not in a way that would be beneficial for the United States. ■ Russia and China had been negotiating this natural gas deal for ten years, and now it is finally done. Russia is the largest exporter of natural gas on the entire planet, and China is poised to become the world's largest economy in just a few years. This new $400 billion agreement means that these two superpowers could potentially enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship for the next 30 years...

John LaForge ■ The Weapons Oligarchy With the Pentagon having secured its annual 47 percent of the April 15 federal tax haul ($1,335 billion out of a total of $2,890 billion) it’s a good time to consider the mountains of money being wasted on useless weapons or just plain stolen. Without a public uproar, U.S. could spend more than $600 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years, according to Alicia Godsberg of Peace Action and others. President Obama has famously mouthed support for “a world without nuclear weapons,” and “a world where these weapons will never again threaten our children,” but his nuclear weapons budget says bombs, bombs and more bombs. For 2014, the President plans a nuclear weapons spending increase over the current level of $7.227 billion. Where’s the money to come from? Taking a page from the Reagan/Thatcher play book, Obama plans to get it from the nuclear non-proliferation budget. According to a report by Jeffery Smith and Douglas Birch in Foreign Policy April 9, the president has proposed a $460 million cut from the nuclear non-proliferation program — so it can boost nuclear weapons building programs by exactly $500 million. Since 2011, Obama has been pushing a plan to spend $85 billion over 10 years to rebuild thousands of H-bombs — bombs that should be retired and abolished. The president has also proposed pouring $125 billion over 10 years into a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, new nuclear bombers and new land-based ICBMs.

Carl Herman ■ There is evil, and then there’s organized evil. This is a memorial outside the village where my brother lives in the south of France. It is a typical village, quite small, perhaps a few hundred residents. The memorial commemorates three young French civilians who were taken out and shot by Nazi soldiers, either for “crimes” of resistance or perhaps as a “lesson” to the restive civilian populace. The German soldiers who pulled the triggers were of course “just following orders.” [...] But to be part of large-scale organized evil, people need to surrender their autonomy under threat, and be ordered by a central authority.

Paul Craig Roberts ■ Lincoln forever destroyed states’ rights, but the suspension of habeas corpus and free speech that went hand in hand with America’s three largest wars was lifted at war’s end. However, President George W. Bush’s repeal of the Constitution has been expanded by President Obama and codified by Congress and executive orders into law. Far from defending our liberties, our soldiers who died in “the war on terror” died so that the president can indefinitely detain US citizens without due process of law and murder US citizens on suspicion alone without any accountability to law or the Constitution. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.” - The conclusion is unavoidable that America’s wars have not protected our liberty but, instead, destroyed liberty.

The name of a CIA station chief overseas normally is a deep secret, most especially in a war zone like Afghanistan. Yet the brand of “smart diplomacy” practiced in the Obama administration resulted in outing the CIA’s top man in Kabul in the course of publicizing President Obama’s surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan over the weekend.

Antiwar.com: CIA’s Kabul Station Chief's Name Emailed to Entire Press Pool

The European parliamentary elections have drawn to a close bringing major gains for both Euroskeptic and Far Right movements. The results have dealt a blow to governments, with the French PM even calling the result "a political earthquake.” ● The most major anti-EU public mood was demonstrated in France, where Marine Le Pen's far right National Front scored more than a quarter of the votes cast. Without even waiting for the final figures, French PM Manuel Valls announced on national television that such a result for the anti-EU party was a political “earthquake” for France – and the entire Europe. "The sovereign people have declared they want to take back the reins of their destiny," said Marine Le Pen. "Our people demand just one politics. The politics of the French, for the French." There was a similar unprecedented story in the United Kingdom, as the unheralded United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) managed to make major gains. The Euroskeptic party's victory marked the first time in modern history that neither Labour nor the Conservatives have won a British national election. UKIP have enjoyed a rapid rise. 20 years ago, they managed to win just one percent of the vote at their very first European elections, however two decades on, they are set to win around 28 percent. At the last elections five years ago, the party won 16.5 percent.

IBT: EU Elections: Eurosceptics Seize Ground, Ukip Unleashes 'Political Earthquake'
Belfast Telegraph: Media no longer the king-makers as Ukip forces mainstream parties to rethink
Chicago Tribune: The French far-right party gets 25% of the votes in European elections
Chris Marsden: Major losses for ruling parties, gains for anti-EU parties in European elections

On Sunday, Ukrainians go to the polls to elect a new president, three months after the previous one was deposed in an armed coup. There some are finer details to the poll, making it not something one expects while electing head of a state. RT takes a look at the underbelly of the Ukrainian presidential campaign, and the people competing for the country’s once-so-coveted highest office.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Moscow is ready to have dialogue with Kiev, and in particular with Pyotr Poroshenko, who is currently leading the presidential vote tally. ● The minister shared Russia’s first reaction to reports of Poroshenko winning the election at a press conference in Moscow. “We hear Pyotr Poroshenko describe relations with Russia as of the utmost importance,” Lavrov said. "We, as [the Russian] president repeated many times, are ready for dialogue with Kiev, ready for dialogue with Pyotr Poroshenko." Lavrov believes Russia and Ukraine do not need any mediators to get relations between the countries back on a friendly footing. “We are ready to cooperate with the EU and the US in what comes to implementation of the [OSCE’s] ‘roadmap’. But I doubt we need a mediator in our relations with Ukraine,” he said. Moscow would like to see Poroshenko deliver on his election campaign promise to stop the military operation in southeastern Ukraine.

Medieval Kingdom of Khazaria, 650-1016 ■ Over a thousand years ago, the far east of Europe was ruled by Jewish kings who presided over numerous tribes, including their own tribe: the Khazars. After their conversion, the Khazar people used Jewish personal names, spoke and wrote in Hebrew, were circumcised, had synagogues and rabbis, studied the Torah and Talmud, and observed Hanukkah, Pesach, and the Sabbath.

Khazaria: Ancestral home of the Ashkenazi, Non-Semite Jews ■ A thousand years before the establishment of the Zionist State of Israel, there also existed a nominally Jewish kingdom on the eastern fringes of Europe. This was the Kingdom of the Khazars astride the Don and Volga rivers. The kingdom of Khazaria was ruled over by two monarchs and inhabited by a mixed population that included people who professed to be descendants of Judah.

LiveLeak: Kiev national guard open fire on civilians at Krasnoarmeysk polling station - Video
VoR: Poroshenko's election campaign cost him over $7 million
Thomas Gaist: Billionaire oligarch declared winner in Ukraine elections
Finian Cunningham: Is Putin caving in to West pressure?
Paul Craig Roberts: The Ukraine Election
Stephen Lendman: Sham Ukrainian Presidential Election
MoA: Ukraine: Major "Western" Think Tank Admits Defeat
The Saker: SITREP from the front lines by "Juan"
The Saker: Ukraine SITREP May 25th, 22:52 UTC/Zulu: Coming full circle with some cautious hope?
Kevin MacDonald: The Unstable Alliance of Nationalists and “Mainly Jewish Oligarchs” in the Ukraine