In the Caucasus, the United States and Russia are vying for control of the region. The great oil game is in full swing. Whoever controls the Caucasus and its roads, also controls the transport of oil that comes from the Caspian Sea.

Al Jazeera:

Tbilisi, Erevan and Baku - the three capitals of the Caucasus. The oil from Baku in Azerbaijan is a strategic priority for all the major companies.

From the fortunes of the Nobel family to the Russian revolution, to World War II, oil from the Caucasus and the Caspian has played a central role. Lenin fixated on conquering the Azeri capital Baku for its oil, as did Stalin and Hitler.

On his birthday in 1941, Adolf Hitler received a chocolate and cream birthday cake, representing a map. He chose the slice with Baku on it.

On June 22nd 1941, the armies of the Third Reich invaded Russia. The crucial battle of Stalingrad was the key to the road to the Caucasus and Baku’s oil, and would decide the outcome of the war.

Stalin told his troops: "Fighting for one’s oil is fighting for one’s freedom."

After World War II, President Nikita Krushchev would build the Soviet empire and its Red Army with revenues from the USSR’s new-found oil reserves.

Decades later, oil would bring that empire to its knees, when Saudi Arabia and the US would conspire to open up the oil taps, flood the markets, and bring the price of oil down to $13 per barrel. Russian oligarchs would take up the oil mantle, only to be put in their place by their president, Vladimir Putin, who knows that oil is power.

The US and Putin‘s Russia would prop up despots, and exploit regional conflicts to maintain a grip on the oil fields of the Caucusus and the Caspian.

But they couldn't have forseen the rise of a new, strong and hungry China, with a seeming limitless appetite for oil and energy. Today, the U.S., Russia and China contest the control of the former USSR’s fossil fuel reserves, as well as the supply routes. The world watch on as they fought for control, a power war, between three ferocious beasts – The American eagle, the Russian bear, and the Chinese dragon.

Up next, the final installment in the series, Part Four, A Time for Lies.

The father of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has called on his son to surrender, but warned the U.S. that “all hell will break loose” if he is killed. Anzor Tsarnaev spoke to ABC News from his home in Russia, while his younger son dodged bullets during a gunfight with Boston police late Thursday night. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers suspected in the marathon attack, was killed in a shootout. Their father said he spoke to both on the phone earlier this week and insisted that they were innocent, but asked his younger son to stop running. “Give up,” he said via ABC News. “You have a bright future ahead of you. Come home to Russia.”

ABC News:

Anzor Tsarnaev spoke to ABC News from his home in the Russian city of Makhachkala as Boston police carried out an intense dragnet for his son Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, survived a running gun battle with police during the night that left an MIT security officer dead and a Boston cop badly wounded. His older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in the shootout.

The father said he spoke to his sons by phone earlier this week. "We talked about the bombing. I was worried about them," Anzor Tsarnaev said.

He said his sons reassured him, saying, "Everything is good, Daddy. Everything is very good."

Then after warning that "If they killed him, then all hell would break loose," the father added "If they kill my second child, I will know that it is an inside job, a hit job. The police are to blame," the father told ABC News. "Someone, some organization is out to get them."

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who is very active on social media, took to Instagram on Friday to issue a statement on the Boston Marathon bombings and to place the blame for the suspects’ actions on the United States. “Any attempt to link Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs, if indeed they are guilty, are futile,” he wrote. “They grew up in the USA, their viewpoints and beliefs were formed there. You must look for the roots of [their] evil in American.” American terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann tweeted Friday morning, “The official media arm of the Chechen mujahideen has rejected allegations that two Chechen men were responsible for the Boston Bombing.”

Asked what America could do if a meteorite like the one that hit Russia last month was three weeks away from hitting New York, NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr.’s answer was “pray.” And we probably wouldn’t even get three weeks’ warning. NASA currently lacks the ability to find and track “small” meteors like the 55-foot one that hit Russia. If we did see one coming and it was still far enough away, apparently the current plan is to ram a spacecraft into it and knock it off course. NASA has only $20.5 million budgeted to detect near-Earth objects, and Bolden suggested at today's House Committee hearing that Congress isn’t taking the problem seriously enough.

The New York Daily News highlights the full exchange that prompted Bolden's response of "pray":

"What would we do if you detected even a small one like the one that detonated in Russia headed for New York in three weeks? What would you do?" Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) asked.

The witnesses turned to look at each other.

"Bend over and what?" Posey pressed, drawing chuckles from the hearing room.

"The answer to you is, if it's coming in three weeks, pray," Bolden said.

Not too comforting.

And, Ruh roh:

He said Americans might want the government to be able to zap asteroids -but the government has not provided the money to do so.

"We are where we are today because you all told us to do something - and between the Administration and the Congress ... the funding did not come," he said.

Damn Republicans!

CBS:

The United States and the rest of the world simply do not have the ability to detect many "small" meteors like the one that exploded over Russia, which has been estimated at roughly 55 feet long. Donald Yeomans, Manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office and the author of "Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us," told CBSNews.com that there are a lot of these small meteors in orbit, and little early warning system in place to detect them.

Yeomans said the most efficient way to find them would be a space-based infrared telescope. This has two benefits: One, the sun would not serve to prevent detection of some objects, and two, the infrared nature of the telescope would mean it would be effective in detecting them. (Part of the reason there was no warning for the Russia meteor is that the sun blinded the satellites.) CBS News contributor and City University of New York physics professor Michio Kaku calls such a telescope a "no brainer," in part because it comes at the relatively low cost of a few hundred million dollars.

"In Russia, if that asteroid had held intact for a few more seconds, it would have hit the ground with the force of 20 Hiroshima bombs," he said on CBS This Morning Tuesday, arguing the investment was worth it. Yeomans also called for ground-based wide field optical telescopes that could scan vast regions of the sky each night.

Another more costlier solution was also discussed, it involved mining asteroids in space, a potential for investment deals and would cost "billions." Talk revolved around landing on and mining this particular asteroid: "An asteroid known as Apophis, which is about 1,000 feet wide and has the potential to wipe a nation off the face of the planet in a direct hit, is expected to come within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029."

A note of some comfort, again, from the Daily News:

"The good news is that the biggest, kilometer-plus objects — like the one suspected of killing off the dinosaurs — typically only hit once every 20,000 years."

More than 700 people were injured when a meteorite shot across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, sending fireballs crashing to Earth, shattering windows and damaging buildings:

MOSCOW — Bright objects, apparently debris from a meteorite, streaked through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a vast area of territory. Hundreds of people were reported to have been injured, most from breaking glass.

Emergency officials had reported no deaths by Friday afternoon, but administrators in the city of Chelyabinsk said that more than 750 residents had sought medical care and 31 had been hospitalized.

Russian experts believe the blast was caused by a 10-ton meteor known as a bolide, which created a powerful shock wave when it reached the Earth’s atmosphere, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement. Scientists believe the bolide exploded and evaporated at a height of around 20 to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface, but that small fragments may have reached the ground, the statement said.

The governor of the Chelyabinsk district reported that a search team had found an impact crater on the outskirts of a city about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk. An official from the Interior Ministry told the Russian news agency Interfax that three large pieces of meteorite debris had been retrieved in the area and that 10,000 police officers are searching for more.

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From last year, this is a flash mob protest in Russia done to the music of "Putin on the Ritz." (They spelled it that way intentionally.)

Patrons celebrating "Coming Out Day" at a Moscow club were caught off guard by an attack on Friday when they initially thought masked men were part of a planned performance for an open mic session.

NYT:

The police in Moscow on Friday were seeking two dozen masked men who stormed one of the city’s most popular gay bars early Thursday and beat patrons — most of them women — with fists and bottles. More than 10 people were injured, and three women and a man were hospitalized after the attack, which coincided with a “Coming Out Day” party, club employees said.

The violence comes during an unnerving year for gay men and lesbians in Russia. Three cities, including St. Petersburg, have passed laws criminalizing “homosexual propaganda,” and a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, the country’s predominant faith, has endorsed an initiative to introduce the laws nationwide.

So far, no such law has been passed in the capital. However, a measure banning gay pride parades in Moscow for a century, until May 2112, was upheld by the city’s highest court in August.

Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993, discrimination against gays remains strong in Russia. Attempts to hold gay pride events have provoked violence by police and militant Orthodox activists.

Independent monitors say this was the seventh violent attack against gays in reported in Russia this year, but said the true number is much higher since many attacks go unreported due to the stigma.

Three members of the Russian band Pussy Riot have spent the last six months in prison for staging a protest against Russian leader Vladimir Putin inside an Orthodox cathedral. On Friday, the group was awarded the LennonOno Grant for Peace award by the artist and activist Yoko Ono. On Thursday, Pussy Riot also received the public backing of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is currently on her first visit to the United States in more than three decades. DemocracyNow!'s Amy Goodman is joined by two guests who have traveled to the United States on Pussy Riot’s behalf: Pyotr Verzilov, husband of jailed Pussy Riot member Nadia Tolokonnikova, and Alisa Obraztsova, lawyer’s assistant with the band’s legal defense team.

A full transcript of the discussion is available here.

Via:

More than 1,000 email credentials from five multinational oil industry companies, including Shell and Exxon and BP, has been dumped online by hackers associated with the Anonymous movement.

The hackers targeted the three giants alongside Russian oil firms Gazprom and Rosneft, each of which is accused of melting the Arctic ice caps. The data dump includes 317 emails and their MD5 hashed passwords from a hack in June, and a further 724 emails and hashed passwords and 26 emails with clear text passwords which were added yesterday, as NovaSecInfo.com explains.

Although most of the information is encrypted, it has been posted online in the hope that volunteers and hobbyists will help crack the details and provide passwords for the email addresses.

There has been no known malicious use of the data thus far, but some very ironic signatures have turned up on Greenpeace's "Save the Arctic" petition...

H/T @timcast

The Arctic ice we all depend on is disappearing. Fast. Soon it could be ice free for the first time since humans walked the Earth. This would be not only devastating for the people, polar bears, narwhals, walruses and other species that live there - but for the rest of us too.

Oil companies are using melting sea ice to drill for more of the oil that is causing global warming in the first place. In fact, Shell’s Arctic fleet will be arriving any day now to begin exploratory drilling off the coast of Alaska this summer. That's just madness. It's time for us to take back sanity from those who have lost the plot.

Our leaders won't listen to her, but they'll listen to you. What do you have to say to those who want to destroy the Arctic?

Greenpeace, Jude Law, Radiohead and hundreds of thousands of people around the world are coming together to demand we save the Arctic from oil drilling, industrial fishing and militarization. Join us at http://www.savethearctic.org

Although protesters across the globe stand up and speak out often for very different reasons, today are united in recognition as Time Magazine's "Person of the Year."

Ladies and gentlemen, young and old, take a bow:

"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.

"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread."

In Egypt the incitements were a preposterously fraudulent 2010 national election and, as in Tunisia, a not uncommon act of unforgivable brutality by security agents. In the U.S., three acute and overlapping money crises — tanked economy, systemic financial recklessness, gigantic public debt — along with ongoing revelations of double dealing by banks, new state laws making certain public-employee-union demands illegal and the refusal of Congress to consider even slightly higher taxes on the very highest incomes mobilized Occupy Wall Street and its millions of supporters. In Russia it was the realization that another six (or 12) years of Vladimir Putin might not lead to greater prosperity and democratic normality.

In Sidi Bouzid and Tunis, in Alexandria and Cairo; in Arab cities and towns across the 6,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean; in Madrid and Athens and London and Tel Aviv; in Mexico and India and Chile, where citizens mobilized against crime and corruption; in New York and Moscow and dozens of other U.S. and Russian cities, the loathing and anger at governments and their cronies became uncontainable and fed on itself.

The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured. Any day that Tunisians, Egyptians or Syrians occupy streets and squares, they know that some of them might be beaten or shot, not just pepper-sprayed or flex-cuffed. The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City. "I think other parts of the world," says Frank Castro, 53, a Teamster who drives a cement mixer for a living and helped occupy Oakland, Calif., "have more balls than we do."

Click here to read the full article.