The Taoist master, alchemist, and pharmacologist Tao Hongjing was born in 456 near present-day Nanjing. He served in various positions at the courts of the Liu Song and Qi dynasties until 492. In that year he retired on Mount Mao (Maoshan), the early seat of Shangqing or Highest Clarity, a Taoist tradition based on meditation and visualisation techniques. The retreat he built on the mountain remained the centre of his activities until his death in 536.

After his initiation into Taoism around 485, Tao set himself to recover the original manuscripts, dating from slightly more than one century before, that contained the revelations at the basis of the Shangqing tradition. Tao authenticated and edited those manuscripts, and wrote extended commentaries on them. This undertaking resulted in two works completed in ca. 500, the Zhengao (Declarations of the Perfected) and the Dengzhen yinjue (Concealed Instructions on the Ascent to Perfection, only partially preserved). These and other works make Tao Hongjing into the first systematizer of Shangqing Taoism, of which he became the ninth patriarch.

During his retirement on Mount Mao, Tao Hongjing also worked on the Bencao jing jizhu (Collected Commentaries to the Canonical Pharmacopoeia), a commentary on the earliest known Chinese pharmacopoeia, the Shennong bencao (Canonical Pharmacopoeia of the Divine Husbandman). The original text contained notes on 365 drugs. To these Tao added 365 more, taken from a corpus of writings that he refers to as “Separate Records of Eminent Physicians.” Tao’s arrangement of the materia medica was innovative. He divided the drugs into six broad categories (minerals, plants, mammals, etc.), and retained the three traditional classes of the Shennong bencao only as subdivisions within each section. In a further group he classified the “drugs that have a name but are no longer used [in pharmacology].” Tao’s commentary discusses the nomenclature, notes changes in the geographical distribution, and identifies varieties; it also includes references to the Taoist “Scriptures of the Immortals” (xianjing) and to alchemical practices. With the exception of a manuscript of the preface found at Dunhuang, the Bencao jing jizhu is lost as an independent text, but has been reconstructed based on quotations in later sources.

Since the establishment of the Liang dynasty in 502, Tao enjoyed the favour of Emperor Wu (r. 502-549), on whom he exerted remarkable influence. Shortly later, he began to devote himself to alchemical practices under imperial patronage. His main biographical source, written in the Tang period, has left a vivid account of these endeavours. Along with scriptural sources they testify the importance of alchemy within the Shangqing tradition, which represents the first known instance of close links between alchemy and an established Taoist movement.

The game is much greater than the sum of its familiar parts. It’s also one of the best shooters so far this year.

When EA announced Dead Space a year ago, I recall some members of the press deriding the game for looking just a little too familiar. I know I was guilty of doing it. But in our defense, you have seen all this before: A massive, grungy industrial starship gone dark, adrift in a remote system with no sign of its crew. A horde of hideous monsters spewing forth from a sinister, amorphous biomass hiding deep within the ship. Audio and text logs scattered around every deck that reveal what happened, piece by piece. An over-the-shoulder perspective that snaps to a zoomed-in aiming view for combat.

Doom 3, check. System Shock 2, check. Gears of War, Resident Evil 4, check.

But all those blatant similarities didn’t matter in the end. After finishing it, I felt stupid about knocking Dead Space for displaying its influences so prominently, because this game is pretty darn amazing.

The story isn’t astoundingly original, but it does a fine job of moving you from one section of the ship to the next. You take the role of deep-space mining engineer Isaac Clarke, a member of a five-man crew dispatched to investigate the loss of contact with the USG Ishimura, an enormous “planetcracker” mining ship. Clarke’s girlfriend was stationed on the Ishimura, so he has personal as well as professional reasons for getting in there and finding out what’s going on. About five minutes after arriving, Clarke’s own ship is toast, his five-man crew is down to three, and those three have been separated by a vile menagerie of creatures overrunning nearly every inch of the ship. Over the course of the game’s 12 roughly hour-long chapters, your priorities will shift from saving the Ishimura to saving your own ass, and you’ll barely fight your way through one tense, frantic monster attack after another as you try to escape the ship. The game is densely packed with spectacular moments from beginning to end, and the action is paced well enough that you never get bored or feel overwhelmed at any given moment.

It’s easy to forgive a game for being derivative when it’s presented with so much impact and it plays so damn well. Dead Space has some of the tightest, most well-balanced controls I’ve ever used in this kind of game. There are so many variables in a third-person shooter that contribute to the way it feels–the camera speed, the sensitivity of the analog sticks, the interval between hitting the aiming-mode trigger and actually being able to fire a gun–and I can’t complain about any one of these factors in Dead Space; they all feel sublimely tuned and perfectly balanced to be easy to use and, above all, fun. You can hold a shoulder button to run, but unlike Gears’ famed roadie run, you can still stop on a dime and break into a sidestep in an instant (or even run backwards). Everything about the moving, aiming, and shooting controls is superbly balanced and really entertaining.

EA has been throwing around the catchy marketing phrase “strategic dismemberment” in reference to Dead Space for a few months now, which is justifiable since that’s actually a good way to describe the combat. Most of the game’s grotesquely mutated enemies have spindly arms, legs, tentacles, and other appendages that you can shoot off with a well-placed shot or two, and you get these satisfyingly meaty snapping sounds and a jet of blood every time you separate another body part. You can also stomp an enemy that’s down but not out with your heavy spacesuit boots to splatter their limbs before they can get back up and keep coming at you. And I do mean splatter–it’s a really gory game.

The precision aiming required to properly dismember the enemies adds more depth to the combat than you’d get with most shooters, where you’re just pumping rounds into a guy’s torso or, at most, aiming for his head. Here, you’ll want to specifically shoot for the knee to stop a fast-running monster from chasing you down, or shear off one of the smaller types of enemies’ tentacles because they can fire spikes with them. The game’s basic pistol weapon, the plasma cutter, even lets you orient its wide beam vertically or horizontally for more accurate slicing and dicing. Another weapon, the ripper, shoots a saw blade about eight feet in front of you and then just holds it spinning in midair, letting you rake it over an enemy and slice them up every which way. You can imagine the possibilities. With eight weapons on the roster and an alternate fire mode for each, there’s a lot of variety in the carnage here.

Dead Space throws in a few more mechanics above the basic shooting action. You can telekinetically pick up and launch some objects as weapons, and you can also throw a stasis field to slow down an enemy briefly, making it easier to take their limbs off with precision. Both of these abilities are useful in fairly frequent environmental puzzles, some of them simple and some clever. I liked that the game didn’t try to portray Isaac as a mining engineer…who also happens to have psionic abilities. Both of these abilities stem from devices in his suit, and that’s that.

Lastly, there are some noteworthy sequences in zero gravity and in a vacuum (sometimes both). The vacuum sequences don’t play any differently–they just feel more urgent, since they put you on a timer as your air tank runs out–but they dramatically desaturate the color palette and dampen the sound almost entirely, which creates a uniquely eerie atmosphere, especially when you’re clomping along with your magnetic boots on the outside of the ship and some monsters silently sneak up behind you and attack. In the zero-G sections, those boots keep you planted while everything else floats freely, and you can jump from any one flat surface to another. So every wall becomes a potential floor and you never really know which way is up. It’s a refreshingly confusing approach to weightlessness that creates some interesting puzzle scenarios.

This is a game you really need to play on a big high-def TV with a good, bass-heavy sound system. It’s an audiovisual tour de force, with some of the moodiest and most impressive lighting effects on this generation of consoles. Some of the interior environments of the Ishimura are positively cavernous, or filled with massive thrumming machinery. There aren’t a lot of boss encounters, but the sheer scale of a couple of them in particular left my jaw hanging open. The sound design is also extremely well done, not just for the ever-present creepy ambient backdrop, but also some of the in-your-face effects, like Isaac’s sonorous gasping when he’s badly hurt and out of breath, or that aforementioned grisly wet crunch of severed monster limbs. The sound effects have a real weight to them that beg to be conveyed over speakers with some serious muscle.

Dead Space would be a great game no matter who made it, but I’m more impressed with it since it’s coming out of EA. That bastion of the annualized sequel is finally taking some risks with original games, if not always original ideas, and in this case the risk paid huge dividends. You’ve probably seen most of Dead Space’s parts in other games from time to time, but you’ve rarely seen them assembled this well.

Historians believe the Queen is a descendant to the founder of Islam – after tracing her family tree back 43 generations.

The claim makes the British monarch a distant ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad.

The findings were first published in 1986 by Burke’s Peerage, a British authority on royal pedigrees.

But the claim has recently resurfaced after a Moroccan newspaper said it had traced the queen’s lineage back to the Prophet.

According to their findings, Elizabeth II’s bloodline runs through the Earl of Cambridge in the 14th century, across medieval Muslim Spain, to Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter.

Although disputed by some historians, genealogical records of early-medieval Spain also support the claim and it has also been verified by Ali Gomaa, the former grand mufti of Egypt.

Burke’s publishing director wrote to the-then Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher in 1986 calling for increased security for the royal family.

‘The royal family’s direct descent from the prophet Mohammed cannot be relied upon to protect the royal family forever from Moslem terrorists,’ he wrote to Thatcher.

Recognising the connection would be a surprise to many, he added, ‘It is little known by the British people that the blood of Mohammed flows in the veins of the queen. However, all Moslem religious leaders are proud of this fact.’

The study from Burke’s Peerage first officially suggested the Queen’s connection to the Prophet Muhammad.

They claimed the Queen descends from a Muslim princess called Zaida, who fled her home town of Seville in the 11th century before converting to Christianity.

Zaida was the fourth wife of King Al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad of Seville. She bore him a son Sancho, whose descendant later married the Earl of Cambridge in the 11th century.

But British magazine the Spectator points out Zaida’s origins are ‘debatable’. Some historians believe she was the daughter of a wine-drinking caliph descended from the Prophet. Others say she married into his family.

The reaction to the Queen’s reported links to the Prophet have been mixed.

Abdelhamid Al-Auouni welcomed the news in his piece in Moroccan newspaper Al-Ousboue, writing: ‘It builds a bridge between our two religions and kingdoms.’

Meanwhile a tongue-in-cheek headline on the Arab Atheist Network’s web forum read: ‘Queen Elizabeth must claim her right to rule Muslims.’

One person on internet forum Reddit rubbished the claims however, writing: ‘This is just propaganda used by the British monarchy to appease the growing number of Muslim subjects.’

Buckingham Palace has been contacted for comment.

In the last decade, fans of sci-fi strategy have divided into two basic groups. One group has stuck with the old-school 4x genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) through thick and thin, preferring the turn-based games that have sprung up in the wake of Master of Orion, Ascendancy and Alpha Centauri, more recent examples being the Space Empires and Galactic Civilizations series. The other group has embraced the RTS genre, adopting the starship combat of Homeworld and its imitators, or the ground-based tactics of StarCraft and Supreme Commander.

In a lot of ways, the chasm only seems to be widening. While the big-league publishers push for the mainstream audience with more action-oriented RTS games like Command and Conquer 3 or Universe at War, the smaller developers involved in the 4x category seem to be making games that are ever more complex, convoluted and inaccessible. Surely there’s room for something that sits in the middle, harnessing the long-term depth of the 4x style to the more exciting pace and visual spectacle of the RTS?

It appears so, because Sins of a Solar Empire is currently looking like the PC sleeper hit of the season. Currently only downloadable from publisher Stardock (annoyingly you’ll have to install and use Stardock’s own client, which didn’t work flawlessly on my machine) if you live in the UK, it’s a sprawling strategy epic that seamlessly combines the 4x and RTS traditions. Note the word seamlessly – this isn’t an RTS with the campaign structured around a political/economic map, nor is it a 4x game where the action switches from turn-based fleet manoeuvres to RTS combat whenever two forces collide. It’s a game where the 4x stuff and the RTS stuff is happening at the same time, all of the time, on the same map.

The secret is the way the game handles scale. Zoom all the way out and you can see the whole of the current planetary system, each star or planet linked to its neighbours by a network of ‘phase lanes’ – essentially hyperspace motorways that enable high-speed travel across the map. Zoom in using the scroll wheel and you can see the planets and the various military and logistic installations orbiting around them. Zoom in further and you can home in on the battleships and frigates in the vicinity, right down to the smallest individual fighter. It’s fast, and gives you a breathtaking sense of the game’s epic scale.

While zoomed out, you can still make out facilities and fleets from the reasonably intuitive icons. While zoomed in, you can admire the graphics in all their glory. Those hoping for a next-generation Homeworld with Unreal 3 engine levels of detail may be disappointed, not least because some of the smaller animations that made Ritual’s debut so lovable are missing. All the same, Ironclad’s own Iron engine does a nice line in bump mapping, plasma effects and specular lighting, all of which help to make the game’s space battles look suitably cinematic when seen up close.

Enjoy the sight of grand battlecruisers exploding, because it’s one you’ll become familiar with the more the game goes on. This is a galaxy at war. The Trader Emergency Coalition is already locked in battle with the cruel Vasari Empire when the Advent, a bunch of religious outcasts, forced from their homeworld years before, come looking for revenge. Not only are the TEC, Vasari and Advent factions scrapping over every system, but the galaxy is infested with gangs of space pirates to boot. There’s no need to get too caught up in the story; with no formal story-based campaign it’s little more than a framework for a whole bunch of skirmish scenarios, but this isn’t a game of gentle colonisation and exploration. It’s a resource grabbing, arms race running festival of destruction, and while alliances, diplomacy and trade have their place, building and using a mighty starfleet is the most crucial aspect of the game.

Doing so involves a lot of work. First, you’ll need money, and that means a) taxes and b) trade. Colonising planets and improving the civilian infrastructure means more happy taxpayers, and therefore more cash in the bank. Secondly, you’ll need facilities; not just frigate factories and capital ship factories to build the ‘bread and butter’ units and commanding capital ships, but defensive structures and military and cultural research facilities. The last bit is important, because Sins of a Solar Empire relies heavily on research in order to optimise the offensive and defensive capabilities of your ships, but also to raise the cap on the number of frigates and capital ships you can command, or give you the skills you’ll need to colonise more hostile worlds. Finally you’ll need metal and crystal resources in order to build your facilities and fleet. All these things are connected by a number of fairly complex game mechanics, but your task is reasonably simple: build and upgrade your fleet then explore, colonise and defend new planets from aggression, while mining resources and boosting civilian facilities to keep the credits flowing. And don’t forget to chip away at your rival factions and deal with the space pirates while you’re at it.

If this sounds like a lot to be getting on with then rest assured: it is. Luckily, the guys at Ironclad have done everything they can to stop it feeling like hard work. For a start, everything in your budding galactic empire is available at a click from the Empire Tree on the left of the screen. This collapsible, tree-structured list means you can click on a single ship or an entire fleet and send it off to battle in some far flung corner of the galaxy, then click on the frigate factory orbiting your home planet and order up some reinforcements, then find a construction frigate and order a new missile platform to be built around your latest acquisition, all without having to scroll around the map or click through a succession of menu screens. What’s more, you can reorganise your ships into separate fleets or ‘pin’ specific fleets or structures if you need to find them quickly, making an initially daunting display surprisingly easy to navigate.

In addition, a lot of things are quite sensibly handled automatically. Ships that ‘phase space’ to a new planet will automatically be added to the fleet surrounding that planet unless you command otherwise. That fleet will automatically attack hostile forces as they phase in, with individual ships picking targets appropriate to their own offensive strengths and defensive weaknesses. Units with special powers, like colonisation or heavy attacks, will use them automatically unless you decree otherwise. In other words, you don’t have to micro-manage every single little aspect of the game – you can keep your head on the big picture, moving the fleet that’s just attacked planet X to defend planet Y when necessary, without having to worry whether every last unit will know what it’s doing. Even construction isn’t a chore. Select a builder unit and ask it to build a metal or crystal refinery and it will pick out the nearest available resource, not sit their dumbly while you specify where to go.

Admittedly, not everything comes easy. The initial tutorials take you through the basics of construction, combat and resource management, but you’re well advised to start off with a short game against a single, easy AI to give you breathing space while you learn the ropes. Pick one without pirates while you’re at it. One thing the initial tutorials don’t make clear is that the pirates in the galaxy operate on a bounty system. Pay them off and they’ll attack your rivals. Don’t bother, and they’ll attack you, sending larger and larger waves of ships the higher the bounty goes up. This can be infuriating, because just as you’re preparing your grand offensive or recovering from a heroic defence, the blasted pirate fleet will show up and knock your right back to square one. Trust me; you’ll have enough to deal with in your first games without dealing with the pirate menace (though note that in games with more than one enemy faction you can make a little cash on the side by attacking the faction with the highest bounty and claiming the prize for yourself).

The combat will also take some getting used to. With so many ships covering quite large distances, this isn’t a game of tank-rush tactics or complex manoeuvres; more a question of ensuring that you deploy balanced forces in sensibly structured waves and understanding how and when to move fleets from one flashpoint to another. Building reinforcements can take time, and phasing in from one planet to another takes time, and going from planet A to planet C will involve two legs in the journey (stopping via planet B) not just one. As a result, you need to keep travel times between planets in mind and avoid sending reinforcements one by one; if you’re already losing the battle, you’ll just send more ships to their demise. Sheer numbers of capital ships can win the day, but you’ll do better if you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your various craft and deploy a balanced selection of all types. What’s more, you also need to protect and make the most of your capital ships. Like the hero units in some RTS games, these gain experience in combat and, through that experience, develop new offensive and defensive capabilities. Grooming super units will make things a lot easier later in the game, but the downside is that there’s nothing more depressing than losing the capital ship you’ve spent hours beefing up in a hasty attack against overwhelming odds. Save often is my advice.

Sins of a Solar Empire is not a game for everyone. It’s very demanding on both your time and your concentration – even a short game can take several hours to complete, and you’ll need several of those before you really understand the various game mechanics. On top of that, it has a tendency to over-prolong the end game, though a) this is a common fault of strategy games and b) there are plans to address this with an upcoming patch. And while the sound of the multiplayer game sounds appealing, will you ever find someone with the time to play through a whole game?

That said, Sins is still a hell of a lot more streamlined and accessible than its standard 4x rivals, most of which look about as much fun as, say, debugging Visual Basic scripts in a complex Excel spreadsheet. Best of all, it reminds me of the Battlefield games, in that it manages to make something powerful and cinematic out of unscripted moments of gameplay. One minute you’re weeping as enemy frigates wipe out your capital ship’s shields, the next you’re cheering as a cluster of your own attack ships arrive and blast the foe to kingdom come. At the same time, it has the depth and obsessive qualities you just don’t get from your regular RTS. Provided you have time, brains and patience, buy it. The effort you put in will be richly rewarded, and it’s all the strategy game you’ll need to last you out the year.

Sins effortlessly combines the depth of the 4x strategy genre with the more straightforward appeal of the RTS. It still hasn’t got the mainstream appeal of, say, World in Conflict or Homeworld, but settle in for the long haul and you’ll find this a very worthy game.

Al-Khwarizmi​ was also known as Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. He was known for writing major works on astronomy and mathematics that introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals and the idea of algebra to European scholars. The Latinized version of his name gave us the term “algorithm,” and the title of his most famous and important work gave us the word “algebra.”

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was born in Baghdad in the 780s, around the time Harun al-Rashid became the fifth Abbasid caliph. Harun’s son and successor, al-Mamun, founded an academy of science known as the “House of Wisdom” (Dar al-Hikma). Here, research was conducted and scientific and philosophic treatises were translated, particularly Greek works from the Eastern Roman Empire. Al-Khwarizmi became a scholar at the House of Wisdom.

At this important center of learning, al-Khwarizmi studied algebra, geometry, and astronomy. He wrote influential texts on the subjects. He appears to have received the specific patronage of al-Mamun, to whom he dedicated two of his books: his treatise on algebra and his treatise on astronomy. Al-Khwarizmi’s treatise on algebra, al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr waʾl-muqabala (“The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing”), was his most important and well-known work. Elements of Greek, Hebrew, and Hindu works that were derived from Babylonian mathematics of more than 2,000 years earlier were incorporated into al-Khwarizmi’s treatise. The term “al-jabr” in its title brought the word “algebra” into western use when it was translated into Latin several centuries later.

Although it sets forth the basic rules of algebra, Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala had a practical objective: to teach. As al-Khwarizmi put it:

…what is easiest and most useful in arithmetic, such as men constantly require in cases of inheritance, legacies, partition, lawsuits, and trade, and in all their dealings with one another, or where the measuring of lands, the digging of canals, geometrical computations, and other objects of various sorts and kinds are concerned.

Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala included examples as well as algebraic rules in order to help the reader with these practical applications.

Al-Khwarizmi also produced a work on Hindu numerals. These symbols, which we recognize as the “Arabic” numerals used in the west today, originated in India and had only recently been introduced into Arabic mathematics. Al-Khwarizmi’s treatise describes the place-value system of numerals from 0 to 9 and may be the first known use of a symbol for zero as a place-holder (a blank space had been used in some methods of calculation). The treatise provides methods for arithmetical calculation, and it is believed that a procedure for finding square roots was included. Unfortunately, the original Arabic text is lost. A Latin translation exists, and though it is thought to be considerably changed from the original, it did make an important addition to western mathematical knowledge. From the word “Algoritmi” in its title, Algoritmi de numero Indorum (in English, “Al-Khwarizmi on the Hindu Art of Reckoning”), the term “algorithm” came into western usage.

In addition to his works in mathematics, al-Khwarizmi made important strides in geography. He helped create a world map for al-Mamun and took part in a project to find the Earth’s circumference, in which he measured the length of a degree of a meridian in the plain of Sinjar. His book Kitab surat al-arḍ (literally “The Image of the Earth,” translated as Geography), was based on the geography of Ptolemy and provided the coordinates of approximately 2,400 sites in the known world, including cities, islands, rivers, seas, mountains, and general geographical regions. Al-Khwarizmi improved on Ptolemy with more accurate values for sites in Africa and Asia, and for the length of the Mediterranean Sea.

Al-Khwarizmi wrote yet another work that made it into the western canon of mathematical studies: a compilation of astronomical tables. This included a table of sines, and either its original or an Andalusian revision was translated into Latin. He also produced two treatises on the astrolabe, one on the sundial and one on the Jewish calendar, and wrote a political history that included the horoscopes of prominent people.

The precise date of al-Khwarizmi’s death is unknown.

While working behind the scenes to shape the post-Maidan Ukrainian government to their liking, powerbrokers in Washington — Biden included — have done all they could to downplay the U.S. role.

Former Vice President Joe Biden launched his candidacy for the American presidency on Thursday morning with the release of his first campaign video, ‘’America Is An Idea.’ The first word from the candidate’s mouth — “Charlottesville,” a town now synonymous with neo-Nazi hate in the U.S. — is the overwhelming focus of the ad, which attacks Trump for his widely criticized “moral equivalence” between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists.

Biden argues that “We are in a battle for the soul of this nation,” after bloviating over b-roll of the infamous torch-lit march the night prior to the murder of activist Heather Heyer by a supporter of Adolf Hitler. “Folks, America is an idea,” Biden says.

Heather Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, seemingly condemned the exploitation of her daughter’s untimely demise, saying “I wasn’t surprised. Most people do that sort of thing. They capitalize on whatever situation is handy.”

Biden’s centering on the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville has also been roundly denounced by Charlottesville locals and activists who bore witness to it on Twitter and other social media. Yet, the candidate has received little scrutiny over the years for his role in abetting the neo-Nazi renaissance in Ukraine that followed the fascist takeover of the government, known as the Euromaidan.

Blowback from the U.S. government support for the far-right coup has already struck Charlottesville. The U.S. previously gave military assistance to the Azov Batallion, a neo-Nazi paramilitary organization that has been incorporated into the Ukrainian national guard. One neo-Nazi contingent present in Charlottesville, comprised of four men indicted by the FBI last year, trained under Azov. During the bloody clashes in Virginia, those men were caught on camera pushing down and repeatedly punching an African-American protester as well as choking and bloodying two women.

Meanwhile, the slayer of 50 Muslims in a white supremacist attack on a mosque and Islamic center in New Zealand earlier this year claimed in his manifesto to have trained under Azov and had a symbol associated with the group on his flak jacket.

Biden’s role in fueling the revival

It is widely known by international observers of Ukraine that Joe Biden, as vice president, served as Obama’s chief operative when it came to matters pertaining to the country.

In late 2013, Biden seemed to have been a key player in former President Victor Yanukovych’s bid to secure a loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Later, Biden would go on to boast that, “after three months into the demonstrations,” he personally told Yanukovych to “walk away” from Ukraine. Yanukovych has lived in exile in Russia since the takeover.

As the U.S. and violent protests were turning up the heat on the government, the U.S. was doing all it could to mold the government to its liking, and Biden played a pivotal role in this process.

In February 2014, leaked recordings emerged of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, plotting to unite the Ukrainian opposition to take over the government. They sought to use Biden as an intermediary with the three main leaders of the opposition, hoping he could get the details of the U.S. plan for the country to “stick” with the trio.

“So Biden is willing,” Nuland assured Pyatt.

Washington had its favorite of the three picked already. The most popular of them had little political or economic experience (he was a professional boxer), while the other guy, Oleh Tyahnybok, had longstanding ties to neo-Nazis, which would have legitimized Russian claims that the uprising was of a fascist nature. Tyahnybok is the leader of the Svoboda Party, a fascist organization that refers to the Holocaust as the “light period” and bans Jews from participation.

One Svoboda leader had posted a Facebook message to Jews in 2017 who were upset with a statue of Symon Petliura, who murdered tens of thousands of Jews: “If you want to live with us, get used to our rules, and if not, go to your land or be punished.”

In the leaked audio, Pyatt said the “problem is going to be Tyahnybok and his guys.”

Nuland responded by saying she thought their favored opposition leader, Arseniy Yatseniuk, needed “Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know.”

This is the plan that Nuland said Biden was “willing” to help further.

By April, Biden was delivering aid packages personally to the opposition. In Ukraine, he met with “leading members of parliament, including several candidates for the presidency — speaking to them of Ukraine’s “heroism” and humiliations. “We want to be your partner, your friend in the project. And we’re ready to assist,” Biden reportedly said.

Among those he met with: Oleh Tyahnybok.

Continuing corruption after the coup

Ukrainian media portrayed the meeting with a different tone. A rough translation of Interfax quotes the then-VP:

“Especially in terms of corruption in Ukraine, he stressed, ‘You are unable to overcome corruption. The world will not tolerate this, nor can we solve this problem. You keep stressing that you need help in the energy sector, but you also have this system completely corrupt.’”

Like his stance on neo-Nazism, Biden’s stance on corruption seems to change with the political winds.

As journalist and lawyer Kevin Zeese recently noted, WikiLeaks previously reported that Biden “pledged U.S. financial and technical assistance to Ukraine” for fracking projects. Just months after Yanukovych was ousted and forced to flee to Russia, Biden’s son, Hunter, was put on the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, the largest private gas company in the country.

As the coup ended, the Washington-backed government eventually took shape under the auspices of billionaire Petro Poroshenko, who became the president in June. Biden may have gotten what he wanted — an ostensible end to corruption in Ukraine’s energy sector. At least that was the goal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who opened an investigation into Burisma Holdings.

And so daddy came to the rescue. Here is Joe Biden, in his own words:

“I got all the good [assignments]. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to — convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t…I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch — he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Biden made those comments at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018, during which he sat on a panel with Michael Carpenter, his former underling at the White House, who helped egg on the Maidan coup.

Biden’s sidekick Carpenter ran cover for neo-Nazi Andriy Parubiy

While working behind the scenes to shape the post-Maidan government to their liking, powerbrokers in Washington — Biden included — have done all they could to downplay the U.S. role.

In an article published last year, Biden and Carpenter co-wrote that “Putin and his associates have long peddled a conspiracy theory that accuses the United States of engineering popular uprisings in… Ukraine in 2004 and 2014.”

Yet Nuland’s own comments at the time (2014) reveal the farcity of the claim:

“Since Ukraine’s independence [read: the collapse of the Soviet Union] in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”

State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson later reaffirmed that $5.1 billion at the expense of U.S. taxpayers was mostly expended via the U.S. Agency for International Development — a CIA cutout — and the Pentagon, among other institutions.

The claim from Carpenter and Biden that Putin has peddled conspiracy theories of the U.S. engineering popular uprisings is evidently the kind of deflection the former has a reputation for.

Carpenter is a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, which is funded by Gulf petro-monarchies and U.S. defense contractors. In addition to special advisor to the vice president, Carpenter’s resume also includes the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon.

Last year, when the neo-Nazi speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, Andriy Parubiy, was invited for a talk hosted at a U.S. Senate building, journalist and author Max Bumenthal asked Carpenter, “Did you think it was a good idea to bring Parubiy, who has founded two neo-Nazi parties, to the Senate for Paul Ryan to meet with him?”

Carpenter replied:

“Look, I think Andriy Parubiy is a conservative nationalist who is also a patriot [who] cares about his country. I don’t think he has any neo-national, neo-Nazi inclinations nor background. I mean, a lot has been made of this. Frankly, I think it’s mostly Russian propaganda.”

Parubiy founded the Social National Party and the Patriot of Ukraine party. The Patriot of Ukraine later branched off into the Azov Battalion and Right Sektor, another fascist paramilitary with its own troubling record of violence against minorities. Both served as shock troops during the Maidan.

Following his confrontation with Carpenter, Blumenthal commented on the Social National Party that “if it sounds like the National Socialist party, that’s because it was directly inspired by the Nazi party.”

On Tuesday, Parubiy tweeted “Glory to the heroes!” and a number of other remarks honoring the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a paramilitary that slaughtered thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Poles. According to the online web journal Defendng History, which is dedicated to exposing the glorification of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, UPA’s “core was composed of Holocaust perpetrating former Auxiliary Police.” UPA’s political directors were also affiliated with a faction of the Organization of Urainian Nationalists led by Nazi collaborator and pogromist Stepan Bandera.

Bandera was involved in the complete ethnic cleansing of Jews from the city of Lviv, once a thriving nerve center of Yiddish culture, with Jews forming 32 percent of the population prior to the pogroms.

More than a decade before the Euromaidan coup, which saw Parubiy gain prominence he could have never attained otherwise, the Ukrainian House Speaker was the chairman of a committee that built a monument to Bandera in Lviv.