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Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko has signed decrees of ousting General Vasily Krutov from the posts of first deputy head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and head of the SBU anti-terrorist centre. Respective papers have been posted on the Ukrainian president's web site. Vasily Krutov was appointed to these positions in the middle of April this year. The Ukrainian president has replaced Krutov with Vasily Gritsak, a Ukrainian police general-lieutenant and deputy chairman of the Ukrainian State Migration Service since April 2013. Petr Poroshenko has also dismissed Vladislav Bukharev from the position of SBU first deputy head responsible for the...

On July 4, 1864, four days after President Abraham Lincoln had surprised him by accepting his resignation, Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase confided to his diary, “I am too earnest, too antislavery … [and] too radical.” Chase surely possessed each of these attributes – in excess – but they had little to do with his unexpected exit from Lincoln’s “team of rivals.” Rather, it was much more personal. Chase’s oft-repeated threat to quit had tested the forbearance of a beleaguered president once too often. Out of patience, Lincoln ended his tenure with the observation that “you and I have reached...

July 5th is the birthday of Admiral James Farragut, the first man to hold the ranks of rear admiral, vice admiral and admiral in the United States Navy. Farragut is notable particularly for his actions during the Civil War, including the capture of New Orleans in 1862. He continued to be on active duty until his death in 1870.

A leaked memorandum from the RAND corporation think tank suggests that Kiev should engage in an all-out war in the eastern regions, including shutting down all communications, putting citizens in internment camps and killing all who resist. The RAND Corporation is non-profit global think tank which offers research and analysis to the US armed forces. In the shocking letter, which has been leaked by the media, the advice offers a step by step brutal guide in how to deal with the population in eastern Ukraine. ‘Military op’s advantages overweigh disadvantage’ In the first line the memorandum notes that the peace...

This video shows a residential area on the north side of Lugansk being shelled. When it zooms in, you can see people standing in the streets, just watching the shells fall. The area is just north of the Train Station (Large building with a circular road), across the river. The video was taken from the same area where the Lugansk live traffic cams are, that I found and posted this morning.

From the live traffic/weather cams for rebel-controlled Lugansk. Smoke and explosions at 515EST. There must be some kind of a fight going on there, again. Latest Tweets say the airport is still in Kiev hands, but it is surrounded, and all the approaches are mined with IED's.

Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is hoping to establish a new ceasefire between Kyiv and pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine, as he hosts Ukrainian, Russian, and French diplomats in Berlin on Wednesday. A German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius had been invited to the afternoon meeting. Lavrov reportedly welcomed the initiative.

A group of hackers called Green Dragon Crew announced on Twitter that the recent cyber-attack on the Privatbank, the largest commercial bank in Ukraine was their doing. The attack appears to be a distributed denial-of-service since on June 30, for a few hours, the bank’s pages either would not load or offered sporadic access to the customers. However, the group also claims that they managed to breach the bank’s systems and that they have access to customer bank accounts. In order to do this, they would have to access different systems because payment service and the website are not part...

Ukraine's President has just under 20 minutes to extend the ceasefire agreement. Poroshenko is under heavy pressure from Moscow to do just that. But there is no sign that the ceasefire has worked, and as the deadline approaches, Ukraine's troops are on the move: The news website Obozrevatel reports that Poroshenko has declared martial law in Donetsk and Lugansk. It's not official yet, but it seems that the ceasefire is over and a new phase of the anti-terror operation (ATO) is just beginning.

A cameraman for Russia's Channel One TV station died from injuries after being shot by Ukrainian troops in Donetsk, the head of the press service for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) said, as quoted by RIA Novosti. “The cameraman was injured in the stomach and died of the wounds,” Klavdia Kulbatskaya said. SNIP--- The cameraman Anatoly Klyan, along with a few other journalists, boarded a bus full of women – mostly mothers – who were traveling to a military base in Donetsk to demand that their sons be dismissed from the unit and allowed to go home, Kulbatskaya added. When...

Combat actions in east Ukraine will only intensify after the truce comes to an end on Monday, TASS cites head of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic Valery Bolotov as saying on Sunday. Kiev’s unilaterally-proclaimed seven-day ceasefire regime expired at 23:00 Moscow time on Friday, June 27. President Petr Poroshenko extended it until 22:00 local time (23:00 Moscow time) on Monday, June 30. Nevertheless, armed clashes between Ukraine’s military and local self-defense forces in east Ukraine have continued, despite the declared ceasefire. SNIP--- The head of the Lugansk People’s Republic also mentioned an armed clash between fighters of the National Guard...

The entire city of Syracuse killed. The entire population of New York City displaced. That's what it would be like if Syria's war was happening in the United States, according to non-profit group If We Were Syrian. In attempt to hammer home the horrific human cost of the Syrian civil war, If We Were Syrian calculated what it would be like if 160,000 people were killed and 9.3 million people evicted from their homes in the United States and the other six G7 countries. The results are horrifying: If you wanted to make it proportional to the size of America's...

With Petroshenko agreeing to extend today's cease-fire deadline for 3 days, the Russians, unfortunately, are not optimistic after the 'expert-level' talks in Europe. Given this, it appears Russia is preparing its retaliation for possible further sanctions that are being waved by Europe and the US. As AP reports, Russia's state-controlled gas company, Gazprom, says it could limit supplies to European customers that intend to re-sell the natural gas on to Ukraine. Whil enot naming specific countries, the Gazprom CEO explained he needed to clamp down on the so-called reverse-flow supplies the the cut-off Ukraine as they were "half-fraudulent schemes." Russia...

BAGHDAD — Iraqi security officials said Wednesday that fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were advancing on the Haditha Dam, the second-largest in Iraq, raising the possibility of catastrophic damage and flooding. Worries about the dam came as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki criticized his political rivals but did not reject entreaties by Western leaders, including a personal visit by Secretary of State John Kerry, to help defuse the crisis by forming a new government with more equitable power sharing among competing groups. The ISIS militants advancing on the Euphrates River dam, about 120 miles northwest of...

Russia's upper house of parliament voted Wednesday to revoke the right of President Vladimir Putin to use Russian troops in Ukraine, as efforts to calm a separatist uprising in Ukraine's east continue. The Federation Council had approved Putin's request for a resolution allowing for the use of force on March 1. But on Tuesday, the President sent a letter to the speaker of the upper house asking it to cancel the resolution. Only one senator voted against revoking the powers Wednesday, with 153 in favor. Putin's request was made in light of ongoing talks on how to settle the crisis...

Many view America's education as a failure, but in at least one important way, it's been a success -- a success in dumbing down the nation so that we fall easy prey to charlatans, hustlers and quacks. You say, "Williams, that's insulting! Explain yourself." OK, let's start with a question or two. Are you for or against global warming, later renamed climate change and more recently renamed climate disruption? Environmentalists have renamed it because they don't want to look silly in the face of cooling temperatures. About 650 million years ago, the Earth was frozen from pole to pole,...

Nine people are feared dead after self-defense forces in the Donetsk region shot down a Ukrainian army helicopter, which was used for transporting military cargo, a Kiev spokesman said. The Mi-8 helicopter was downed “at about 5 pm local time at Karachun Mountain near Slavyansk by a rocket fired from a portable air defense system,” eastern Ukraine military operation spokesman, Vladislav Seleznyov, wrote on his Facebook page. “There were nine people aboard the helicopter. According to preliminary information, all those aboard died in the crash,” he said, adding that the helicopter was returning to a Ukrainian checkpoint after a cargo...

DETAILS TO FOLLOW Borodai, the "Prime Minister" of the Donetsk Republic went on Television to announce this, which is apparently a result of the first talks between the rebels and Kiev, today in Donetsk.

All the time I was growing up in Atlanta, the face of Robert E. Lee was taking shape on the side of an enormous granite mountain just outside town. He loomed like a god above us, as much a presence as any deity, and God knows he was accepted as such. It was only much later that I began to question his sanctity, and then to hate what he stood for. When I was in elementary school, the face of Lee on Stone Mountain was a rough-cut thing, weathering and wasting as the generation that began it in 1912—a generation...

I want to the start in a different place. The media keeps saying we are a nation that is being torn apart at the seams. In some ways, I agree with them, only because we are not looking for the things that bring us together. The left and right, we can’t agree on anything, right? The only place we can find common ground is in the hatred of one another. That’s the narrative that everybody is giving you. Unfortunately, there is some truth to that, unless we decide to look for more. We have been greatly divided. When the President...