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SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine (AP) — Russian troops took over the strategic Crimean peninsula Saturday without firing a shot. The newly installed government in Kiev was powerless to react, and despite calls by U.S. President Barack Obama for Russia to pull back its forces, Western governments had few options to counter Russia's military moves. Russian President Vladimir Putin sought and quickly got his parliament's approval to use its military to protect Russia's interests across Ukraine. But while sometimes-violent pro-Russian protests broke out Saturday in a number of Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine, Moscow's immediate focus appeared to be Crimea.

BETHLEHEM, Pa. - Imagine there are no prisons; it may be hard to do. Yet that is exactly what social activist Angela Davis challenged an audience of about 725 people to do Monday night at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. The program’s topic was “Mass Incarceration: The Prison Industrial Complex.” **** She also is the author of eight books, including “Are Prisons Obsolete?” and a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex by “challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.”

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday temporarily froze the U.S. assets of Mt. Gox chief Mark Karpeles and allowed alleged victims of the shuttered bitcoin exchange to demand evidence of what they claim is a massive fraud. The market for the digital currency was rocked last month when Mt. Gox, once the world's largest bitcoin exchange, ceased operations, and soon after filed for bankruptcy. Mt. Gox said it may have lost 750,000 bitcoins, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in a hacking attack. The freeze on Karpeles' assets, issued by Judge Gary Feinerman in Chicago, also applies to Mt. Gox's...

The veteran FBI agent and a local sheriff’s deputy took no chances when they got a credible tip about a potential terrorist. In a joint operation, they ran his name through a maze of federal criminal and terrorism databases and scrutinized his telephone records for suspicious contacts. Without a warrant, they couldn’t read his emails or listen to his calls. But they watched him from unmarked vehicles to track his daily routine and to see whom he met. They deployed two confidential informants more than a dozen times to secretly record his conversations. They interviewed him twice and convinced him...

BERLIN--The U.S. National Security Agency allegedly spied on Chinese technology company Huawei Technologies Co. in early 2009 and targeted Chinese officials including former President Hu Jintao, according to German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. The allegations were contained in pre-released extracts of an article from next week's edition, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Aside from Mr. Hu, other NSA targets in China included the Chinese Trade Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and unidentified banks, Der Spiegel reported. In the extracts, Der Spiegel didn't elaborate on the alleged spying on the officials. Referring to a top-secret NSA presentation,...

MIAMI — The donations kept pouring in: hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to President Obama and more than a dozen members of Congress, carefully routed through the families of two wealthy brothers in Florida. They had good reason to be generous. The two men, Roberto and William Isaias, are fugitives from Ecuador, which has angrily pressed Washington to turn them over, to no avail. A year after their relatives gave $90,000 to help re-elect Mr. Obama, the administration rejected Ecuador’s extradition request for the men, fueling accusations that such donations were helping to keep the brothers and...

The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures are contained in two letters of “Congressional notification” originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept secret until now. In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during “routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems,” the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and the CIA’s head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he’s concerned “about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the...

I just had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with a Council on Foreign Relations group at the United States Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. Its commander, the famed Admiral William H. McRaven, started the briefing, followed by his staff. I expected to learn about Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and their air force and marine counterparts. I thought I would hear about the exploits of this 67,000-strong command operating in 84 countries, maybe even about the taking down of Osama bin Laden. But that was not to be. Instead, he and the other officers...

KIEV, Ukraine — To Viktor Yushchenko, the man at the heart of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution a decade ago, March 2014 looks a lot like August 1939. Europe, once again, is at war. But Europe is also, once again, refusing to realize it and react. Yushchenko, the former Ukrainian president who has spent much of his political life at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and incurred his wrath, says there should not be any doubt about what is going on: Putin’s Russia has been waging economic and information war on his country for years. It has now added a territorial...

A new classified intelligence assessment concludes it is more likely than previously thought that Russian forces will enter eastern Ukraine, CNN has learned. Two administration officials described the assessment but declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the information. The officials emphasized that nothing is certain, but there have been several worrying signs in the past three to four days. “This has shifted our thinking that the likelihood of a further Russian incursion is more probable than it was previously thought to be,” one official said. The buildup is seen to be reminiscent of Moscow’s military moves...

Working with dubious sourcing, a group close to NATO's chief military commander Philip Breedlove sought to secure weapons deliveries for Ukraine, a trove of newly released emails revealed. The efforts served to intensify the conflict between the West and Russia. Most of the 1,096 hacked emails date back to the dramatic 12 months of the Ukraine crisis after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Thousands died in the skirmishes between Kiev's troops and Moscow-aligned separatists. More than 2 million civilians fled eastern Ukraine. Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove's...

The height of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, Europe, and the United States also coincided with a period in which the Obama administration came under the heaviest scrutiny over its response to that health crisis. Amid criticism, President Barack Obama rejected calls from lawmakers to impose some travel restrictions on the areas affected by Ebola, but he did say his administration was open to appointing one figure to oversee his government’s response to the crisis. Days later, Obama appointed Ron Klain, a long-time Democratic political operative and veteran of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, to serve as...

I know it is a numbers station and this one is supposedly Russian. From the graphic, has it been busy the past 24 hours? http://uvb-76.net/p/last-24h.html Also here, http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ put in 4625 for the freq. It's deviated a couple times tonight...

Obama in the city for Clinton ally’s fundraiser By Emily Smith President Obama is coming to Manhattan Tuesday for yet another fund-raiser, hosted by longtime Hillary Clinton friend and bundler Alan Patricof. While the president is flying in on Air Force One for the intimate “fireside chat” at Patricof’s home in front of just 26 people at the $32,400 per ticket event, private equity and venture capital pioneer Patricof has made it clear the fund-raiser is not to bolster Obama, but to boost the Democratic National Committee ahead of a possible Clinton presidential run.

The White House announced that Vice President Joe Biden would spend the weekend vacationing in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It's his second vacation there in three months. His White House schedule reads: DAILY GUIDANCE FOR THE VICE PRESIDENT Friday, March 7 – Sunday, March 9 The Vice President and Dr. Jill Biden will visit the U.S. Virgin Islands. There are no public events scheduled. And as Geoff Earle of the New York Post reported on December 27, the vice president spent New Year's on the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Re: Fwd: 31 March Meeting From: Eryn_M_Sepp@who.eop.gov To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2014-03-14 02:23 Subject: Re: Fwd: 31 March Meeting OK. Will make it work and fly you to Berkeley the next AM if you want it to work. From: John Podesta [mailto:john.podesta@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 11:05 PM To: Sepp, Eryn Subject: Fwd: 31 March Meeting Let's discuss. JP --Sent from my iPad-- john.podesta@gmail.com For scheduling: eryn.sepp@gmail.com Begin forwarded message: From: robbymook@gmail.com Date: March 13, 2014 at 9:15:40 AM EDT To: Cheryl Mills > Cc: "daplouffe@icloud.com" >, John Podesta > Subject: Re: 31 March Meeting Roger all of that. I...

Everyone missed what is now, in hindsight, a crystal clear signal that the White House knew that the buffalo chips were about to hit the fan; and that they are very worried.On April 21, the White House announced that Neil Eggleston would be the new counsel to the president. It didn't get much notice, but in light of recent events, it's a really big deal.

The household cleaning agent chlorine, in heavy concentration is purchased by Iran and and fitted with detonators, to provide President Bashar Assad with a vehicle for cheating on his undertaking to surrender Syria’s chemical arsenal under the year-old US-Russian chemical disarmament accord. And Assad is indeed getting away with using chlorine bombs, with crippling effect, especially on children, every few days. On April 7, Israel Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon offered chapter and verse to prove that the Syrian army had perpetrated a chemical attack on civilians in he town of Harasta on March 27, causing scores of serious injuries and...

Alberto Youssef, a convicted money launderer and former bon vivant, sat in a Brazilian jail cell in March of last year, getting ready to tell his lawyers a story. It was about an elaborate bribery scheme involving Petrobras, the government-controlled oil giant. He opened with a dire prediction. “Guys,” Mr. Youssef said, “if I speak, the republic is going to fall.” To those lawyers, Tracy Reinaldet and Adriano Bretas, who recently recounted the conversation, this sounded a tad melodramatic. But then Mr. Youssef took a piece of paper and started writing the names of participants in what would soon become...

Despite Hillary Rodham Clinton’s promise that she had scrubbed illegal cash contributions from her 2008 presidential campaign, prosecutors revealed Monday that the mastermind of Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s “shadow campaign” also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to aid Mrs. Clinton’s bid for the White House.