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The Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has threatened to retaliate for the grounding of a subsidiary of Aeroflot, the national airline, because of EU sanctions, with one newspaper reporting that European flights to Asia over Siberia could be banned. Such a move would enforce costly detours on airlines, including Lufthansa and IAG, owner of British Airways, as more fuel would be needed for extended routes. Low-cost carrier Dobrolyot, operated by Aeroflot, suspended all flights last week after its airline leasing agreement was cancelled under European Union sanctions because it flies to Crimea, a region Russia annexed from Ukraine in March....

Russian President Vladimir Putin has urged his government to come up with countermeasures to Western sanctions imposed against Russia over the Ukrainian conflict. Putin stressed that Moscow’s response should be “cautious.” “Obviously we need to do it cautiously in order to support domestic manufacturers, but not hurt consumers,” he said on Tuesday. The president expects the government to present a response to the sanctions as soon as possible. Putin said that the political tools of pressure being used against the Russian economy are unacceptable, stressing that they go against international rules and norms. Putin’s comments come on the same day...

Russia has called for emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday over what it called an urgent humanitarian situation in Ukraine, according to a report from the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. "We are convening an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine," Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vitaly Churkin was quoted as saying. Earlier on Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said the U.N. and the International Committee of the Red Cross expressed "readiness" to discuss its plan to deploy a "humanitarian mission" to Ukraine, which some consider to be a...

Mary Baxter Gresham was 42 when her invalid son, LeRoy, died in June 1865. She had already lost two infant children and had just lived through the upheaval of the Civil War in Macon, Ga. But when 17-year-old LeRoy, know as “Loy,” died on June 18 in the house where he was born, she was devastated. “God has tried me often and in many ways but never has my heart been so wrung as now,” she wrote to her sister, Sallie, on July 12. “And yet the trial had so much mercy mixed with it that my soul swells within...

It was during the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, when Admiral David Farragut ordered what would eventually be a successful run through a minefield and eventually lead to an important Union victory and the capture of Mobile Bay, the final Confederate-held port east of the Mississippi River. When Farragut, lashed to the rigging in order to see above the smoke of the battle, saw his ships slow as they approached and was told there were torpedoes (mines) in their path, he was reported to have said, "Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead!" or "Full speed ahead!" No one...

Andriy Parubiy, the secretary of the Ukrainian national security and defense council, allegedly submitted resignation two weeks ago, a Ukrainian online edition reported on Monday. "Parubiy made this decision after he was proposed to announce a new stage of ceasefire in the counter-terrorist operation in eastern Ukraine," ZN.UA said citing an unnamed source. ZN.UA said that Parubiy refused to make this announcement and decided to step down. The secretary's press service said they had no information on his resignation

Hunters may be hired to kill 2,800 deer on Civil War battlefields By Dante D'Orazio on August 2, 2014 04:47 pm   (Scott Bauer, US Department of Agriculture / Flickr)  7inShare Civil War battlefields may soon light up with gunfire once again if a new plan to "reduce" deer populations gets approved. The US National Parks Service has proposed a $1.8 million plan to hire sharpshooters to hunt and kill white-tailed deer at three Civil War battlefields over the next five years.Deer populations at the Antietam and Monocacy battlefields, located in Maryland, as well as the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, are far...

The innocent American could only read the headlines and shake his head sorrowfully at the continuing carnage in Gaza -- a pillar of fire by night and a cloud of smoke by day. How did this happen again? Simple: Hamas renewed its indiscriminate attacks on Israel through overhead rockets, underground tunnels, words and deeds -- and Israel finally responded in force. Not just the innocent but the sophisticated observer has to wonder: Why? What's the sense of it? There seems none from the rational -- that is, the conventionally Western -- point of view. Which may explain why generations...

The Obama administration has notified Congress of its plans to train and arm the Ukrainian national guard next year, the Pentagon said on Friday, as Washington continues to intensify its response to Moscow's support for rebels in eastern Ukraine. "The Defense Department and State Department have notified Congress of our intent to use $19 million in global security contingency fund authority to train and equip four companies and one tactical headquarters of the Ukrainian national guard as part of their efforts to build their capacity for internal defense," Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby told reporters. The training, which requires...

The U.S. will be providing Ukraine with an additional $8 billion to bolster its border guard capabilities, the White House announced Friday. Vice President Joe Biden announced Friday that the U.S. will provide approximately $8 billion to help bolster Ukraine's State Border Guard Service. Biden shared the news with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko during a phone call on Friday. "This additional assistance," the White House said, "includes engineering equipment for improving infrastructure along Ukraine's borders, transport and patrol vehicles, surveillance equipment to extend the visual range of border security patrols, and small boats to conduct maritime patrol and interdiction operations."

He's already 20 minutes late....

Tuesday, July 29 15:20 GMT: Kiev is ready for a cease-fire “now,” US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed, following a meeting with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin in Washington. Kerry added that President Petro Poroshenko is also ready to start talks with the militia in the southeast of the country. 15:06 GMT: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in a telephone conversation with US State Secretary John Kerry has urged Washington to influence Kiev to achieve a prompt ceasefire and to start negotiations with southeast Ukraine. Lavrov stressed the need to return to the accord achieved at Geneva on July...

Plans for a team of unarmed Dutch and Australian police officers to visit the site of the Malaysia Airlines plane disaster have been cancelled. Fighting around the site of the airliner downed in eastern Ukraine prevented the visit. The vast crash scene, which covers 20 square miles, mostly fields, is currently controlled by pro-Russian separatists who are battling Ukrainian government forces in a months-long conflict. A Ukrainian defence official said his troops were trying to clear the areas around the site near the village of Grabovo from rebels. There was reportedly fighting at several locations, including near the town of...

The International Monetary Fund has urged Ukraine's fragile government to honor its bailout obligations, a sign the fund is concerned a breakdown in the country's coalition could jeopardize its emergency financing package. Ukraine's ruling coalition broke up on Thursday, with Prime Minister Arseniy Yansunyuk submitting his resignation, jeopardizing passage of a supplementary budget that may be needed for the IMF's executive board to approve the next tranche of financing in late August. The fund said IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde discussed the implications of the political developments with President Petro Poroshenko and Mr. Yatsenyuk by telephone on Friday. (SNIP) The...

Terrible ideas never really die on the Left; they just come back over and over again, like a gas station sandwich after a night of heavy drinking. So it is with reparations for slavery, which liberals would happily embrace en masse if they ever thought they could ram it through Congress. Here's why reparations for slavery are a bad idea. 1) How do you prove that slavery is responsible for problems black Americans are having today? If it were 1866, it would be easy to prove that black Americans who had been enslaved were hurt by the practice. They were...

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday that it considered Ukraine to be in a state of civil war, urging both sides to respect the laws of conflict as civilians bear the brunt. The formal classification means participants in the fighting between government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the east could eventually be prosecuted for war crimes in international courts. "Fighting in eastern Ukraine continues to take its toll on civilians, and we urge all sides to comply with international humanitarian law, otherwise known as the law of armed conflict," ICRC director of operations Dominik Stillhart said in...

18 Ukrainian servicemen have returned home after undergoing medical treatment at hospitals in the Russian southern city of Rostov-on-Don, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Zvarych told Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday, July 24.

The Communist Party of Ukraine will cease to exist on Thursday, the speaker of Ukraine's parliament announced. "We only have to tolerate this party for another day," Verkhovnaya Rada speaker Oleksandr Turchinov said on Wednesday in comments carried by online news portal Ostro.org. Discussion of the Communist Party's dissolution began in earnest in May, after party leader Petro Simonenko said that if he were in charge of the country, he would immediately call back the troops from eastern Ukraine, referring to the military operations taking place there as acts of "war against the people," RIA Novosti reported. Turchinov, who was...

A Russian television channel said on Wednesday it had lost contact with a British journalist reporting from conflict-torn eastern Ukraine. RT said on its website it had been unable to reach Graham Phillips since the early hours of Wednesday after he went to cover intense fighting around Donetsk airport. The channel said it received a text message from Phillips saying "All is fine" at around 2:00am, after which contact was lost. RT's editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, posted a link to the story on her Twitter account, saying "our stringer Graham Phillips has gone missing in Ukraine." RT said it had warned...

The Red Cross has made a confidential legal assessment that Ukraine is officially in a war, Western diplomats and officials say, opening the door to possible war crimes prosecutions, including over the downing of Malaysia Airlines MH-17. "Clearly it's an international conflict and therefore this is most probably a war crime," one Western diplomat in Geneva told Reuters. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions setting down the rules of war, and as such is considered a reference in the United Nations deciding when violence has evolved into an armed conflict. "Within...