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A wave of savage mockery broke over Russian President Vladimir Putin across the Internet on Friday, sparked by days of absence from public view, despite official insistence it was business as usual in the Kremlin. State television footage of Putin working at his residence failed to quell the tide of fantastical theories circulating online that the 62-year-old Kremlin leader had died, been deposed, or travelled to Switzerland to watch his girlfriend give birth. Ukrainian children produced a cartoon showing Putin abducted from the Kremlin by aliens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq54_izN4Bo The hashtag #putinumer (putin died) began trending on Twitter, and a website, putinumer.com,...

Russian president Vladimir Putin and his long-time ally Victor Ivanov, who is currently head of Russia’s narcotics agency, have been implicated in helping run a drug smuggling and money laundering ring in St Petersburg in the 1990s. The allegations were made by ex-KGB officer Yuri Shvets who spoke at the inquiry into the death Alexander Litvinenko yesterday. Shvets testified in front of Ben Emmerson QC, expanding on a report he had compiled with fellow ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, a few months prior to the latter’s death from polonium poisoning. According to Shvets’ sources, which include the late...

In the midst of Vladimir Putin’s mysterious absence, it appears that the Kremlin is announcing something big. Pictures of Putin allegedly meeting a leading judge today may be formerly staged photos. Beyond this, a large stage is being built in Red Square– right near Boris Nemstov’s murder: The Kremlin has now announced that there will be a major announcement in the next couple of days. It has advised journalists not to leave Moscow. The exact announcement is still unknown but sparking speculation. A source in the press service of the President of Russia says he is preparing a major announcement...

Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said that if Greece failed to get a new debt agreement with the euro zone, it could always look elsewhere for help. "What we want is a deal. But if there is no deal - hopefully (there will be) - and if we see that Germany remains rigid and wants to blow apart Europe, then we have the obligation to go to Plan B. Plan B is to get funding from another source," he told Greek television show that ran in to early Tuesday. "It could the United States at best, it could be Russia,...

The Greek liquidity, pardon "cash flow" problems are so bad, not only Zero Hedge, but also Bloomberg has launched a daily maturity tracker of how much money Greece has to pay either to the IMF or to prefund T-Bill rollovers. This is what Bloomberg blasted out earlier today: Greece is preparing for another week of hurdles that ends with a ~EU2b repayment on March 20. Most economists say that it will be difficult for Greece to get past end of March without fresh EU funds. Here’s a timeline of the most important events scheduled this week: Monday, March 16: Greece...

Having previously hinted that they might 'dip' into public pensions funds for some short-term cash to payback The IMF, and then confirming that the plan is to repo that cash from pension cash reserves (raising concerns about how they will unwind the repo - i.e. pay it back); the Greek government finally signed the bill today that enables them to plunder the Greek people's pension funds (for their own good). The massive irony of this bill is the bill enables greek deposits to be fully invested in Greek sovereign bonds... which Tsipras and Varoufakis both admitted today is "unsustainable" and...

Back in 2009, just months after his swearing in, president Barack Obama was crowned with an unexpected glory: he won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 due to "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Back then there was little indication that just a few years after his crowning achievement of "ending the war" in and returning US troops from Iraq, he would send US troops right back in Iraq for the 3rd US invasion of the country in three decades, but also send out US troops across the globe, and launch the second cold war,...

The first anti-government rally in Athens turned ugly as anti-authoritarian protesters started to smash the windows of a pastry shop and two jewelry shops and put two vehicles and several garbage bins on fire.

One of the biggest question marks surrounding the Greek negotiation and ultimately, bailout extension, was just how panicked was the Greek population and domestic corporations. Recall that as explained previously, the tension boiled down to this: the Troika did everything in its power to accelerate the bank run in order to crush any negotiating leverage Varoufakis may have; Greece on the other hand was desperate to make its cash drain appear far better than rumored. Moments ago the Bank of Greece presented its latest, January, deposit data. And it's a doozy: following a record €12.2 billion monthly outflow, greater...

When Hasan Erol and other parents learned that their children’s school would be converted to specialise in Islamic education, they hit the streets. Yeşilbahar Middle School is among five in Istanbul’s staunchly secular district of Kadıköy to have been earmarked for conversion into imam-hatips, religious schools in which 20% to one-third of hours are dedicated to Sunni Islamic study. “They want to transform this area into something else,” says Erol, whose 13-year-old son goes to the school. “They want to make it more conservative by bringing imam-hatips here.” Yeşilbahar was spared. Authorities relented in the face of protests and a...

Greece's new nationalist defense minister prompted Greece's perennial rival Turkey to scramble jets on Friday, just days after he took office, by flying over uninhabited islets off the Turkish coast that nearly triggered a war in 1996. Turkish fighter jets entered Greek airspace and were intercepted by Greek jets as Defence Minister Panos Kammenos and military chiefs flew by helicopter to the islet of Imia to drop wreaths in memory of three Greek officers killed nearby in a helicopter crash 19 years ago, the Greek Defence Ministry said. Kammenos heads the small, right-wing, Eurosceptical Independent Greeks party, and the episode...

A Greek exit from the euro would see the euro collapse like a house of cards, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis warned in comments that triggered a spat with Italy. "Greece's exit from the euro is not something that is part of our plans, simply because we believe it is like building a house of cards. If you take out the Greek card, the others will collapse," Varoufakis said in an interview with Italian public broadcaster RAI that was aired on Sunday. Varoufakis also incurred the wrath of his Italian counterpart Pier Carlo Padoan by comparing Italy's problem with its large...

Latvia's security is at risk from Russian-funded advocacy groups waging "information war" that suggests the Baltic state is persecuting its Russian minority, its interior minister said in an interview. Latvia and neighboring Estonia and Lithuania, all part of the Soviet Union until 1991, are wary about their newly assertive giant neighbor Russia, which has long complained the rights of ethnic Russians are being undermined in the Baltics

Moscow’s involvement in conflict has been on such a scale that strain on its military is starting to show, according to report by Royal United Services Institute. Large-scale intervention in eastern Ukraine by regular Russian troops began last August, reaching a peak of 10,000 in December, and Moscow has been struggling to maintain operations on such a scale and intensity, according to a report. The Rusi report also confirms... that Russian artillery shelled Ukrainian positions from inside Russian territory... the Rusi report says that a total of 42,000 Russian troops from 117 combat and combat-support units have been involved, either...

Rumors have been swirling about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s taking usually unheard of sick days. Putin was supposed to go to Kazakhstan this week to meet in Astana with President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, but a Kazakh official told Reuters, “The visit has been cancelled. It looks like he has fallen ill.” Belarus officials wouldn’t comment, the report said. Russia’s Interfax news agency got Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, to confirm the Kazakh cancellation. But “the president feels fine,” that report said. The Moscow Times said Peskov “did not pick up repeated phone calls.” A Russian news outlet...

Earlier today, the leader of Britain’s UKIP, eloquent wordsmith and member of the EU Parliament, Nigel Farage, unleashed one of his most memorable and finest diatribes in recent years. "We ourselves in the European Union provoked the conflict through our territorial expansionism in the Ukraine. We poked the Russian bear with a stick, and unsurprisingly, Putin reacted. But this now is to be used as an opportunity to build a European army... And Mr. Juncker said, we must convey to Russia that we are serious. Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Juncker?" Farage at his best...

MOSCOW — A suspect in the murder of the opposition politician Boris Y. Nemtsov blew himself up as the police closed in on him overnight, Russian news reports said on Sunday, while new disclosures indicated that one of the men already detained in the killing had served as a police officer in the fight against Islamic insurgents. Five suspects were due to be arraigned at Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, said in a statement. Security forces established a cordon around the court. The two prime suspects, whose names have been officially confirmed,...

Pro-Russian separatist fighters stand on a road near Uglegorsk, 6 kms southwest of Debaltseve, on February 9, 2015 (AFP Photo/Dominique Faget) Washington (AFP) - The United States charged Friday that Russia was continuing to deploy heavy weapons in eastern Ukraine, before a ceasefire agreed this week goes into effect. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States had received reports of heavy weapons being moved into eastern Ukraine from Russia over the past few days, and more apparently on the way. "This is clearly not in the spirit of this week's agreement," Psaki told reporters. She said the Russian...

If the sadists of ISIS are seeking -- with their mass executions, child rapes, immolations, and beheadings of Christians -- to stampede us into a new war in the Middle East, they are succeeding. Repeatedly snapping the blood-red cape of terrorist atrocities in our faces has the Yankee bull snorting, pawing the ground, ready to charge again. "Nearly three-quarters of Republicans now favor sending ground troops into combat against the Islamic State," says a CBS News poll. The poll was cited in a New York Times story about how the voice of the hawk is ascendant again in the GOP....

A Syrian businessman described as the "middleman" for oil deals between ISIS and Bashar al-Assad's regime will be targeted for European Union sanctions on Saturday. The listing of George Haswani, the owner of HESCO engineering company, sheds more light on financial links between Syria's regime and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or Isil or Islamic State or Daiesh).