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The United States and Russia are dangerously close to stumbling into a war over Ukraine that could go nuclear and kill hundreds of millions of people in a single day, a Nobel laureate who is one of the world’s leading experts on the dangers of nuclear weapons warned in Washington this week. “It’s an incredibly dangerous situation. …If there’s a nuclear war tonight, that’s the Northern Hemisphere (of the entire world) gone, Dr. Helen Caldicott told a National Press Club Newsmakers news conference on Wednesday. She was speaking on the topic: “Ukraine: Is Nuclear Conflict Likely?” Caldicott is an Australian...

Republicans are canceling TV ad spending planned for the final two weeks of Michigan’s U.S. Senate race, signaling that the GOP is investing in other races in its drive for the Senate majority. The National Republican Senatorial Committee pulled nearly $1 million in ads for the weeks of Oct. 21 and Oct. 28, according to a political operative who tracks ad spending. Democrat Gary Peters leads Republican Terri Lynn Land in Michigan. …

Obama Stops Short of Blaming Russia For Downed Jet in Ukraine By DAVID S. CLOUD, KATHLEEN HENNESSEY President Obama on Friday condemned the missile attack that downed a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine as an "outrage of unspeakable proportions" but stopped short of blaming Russia directly for the tragedy.

As The West Declines, Russia Fills The Vacuum The Coalition has no foreign policy and no solutions to offer in the growing chaos of a world without moral leadership By Janet Daley19 Jul 2014 Presumably there are at least a few politicians in the great Western capitals who have some idea of how to get a grip on the current global chaos. Perhaps at some point they will let us know what it is. At the moment, all that we are getting is banalities and obfuscation, which seem to be a cover for total panic. Apart from the obvious words...

Ratings of U.S., European Union leadership sink to record lows, in single digits WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Vladimir Putin's popularity in Russia is now at its highest level in years, likely propelled by a groundswell of national pride with the annexation of Crimea in March on the heels of the Sochi Olympic Games in February. The 83% of Russians saying they approve of Putin's leadership in late April/early June ties his previous high rating in 2008 when he left office the first time. The 29-percentage-point increase in Putin's job approval between 2013 and 2014 suggests he has solidified his previously...

July 18, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - With Kiev's forces being encircled and decimated in eastern Ukraine, western Ukrainians in Kiev protesting the war, and US sanctions receiving global ridicule as feckless - the downing of a Malaysian Boeing 777 airliner with over 280 on board in eastern Ukraine - allegedly shot down over a conflict zone - will undoubtedly be exploited by NATO to vilify Kiev's opponents, particularly fighters in the east and Russia who NATO accuses of "destabilizing eastern Ukraine." Preceding the downing of Malaysian flight MH17, just hours beforehand, Ukraine claimed Russia had shot down...

With tear-gas flying in the streets of Turkey, Ukraine's civil-war raging in the south and east, US drones based in Japan to oversee the South China Sea, and Europe's extremist parties gaining significant traction, today we get one more piece of considerably worrisome geopolitical news that global stock markets must ignore. The Sunday Times reports that Israel is to deploy three submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf that are meant to act as a deterrent, gather intelligence and potentially to land Mossad agents. Iran is not happy, warning that "anyone who wishes to do an evil...

Dealing a defiant blow to the Kremlin, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine signed a long-delayed trade pact with Europe on Friday that Moscow had bitterly opposed. He then declared he would like his country to one day become a full member of the European Union. In so doing, Ukraine’s new leader, a billionaire confectionary magnate, has in effect raised a risky bet on the West that has cost his country hundreds of lives and the loss of the Crimean peninsula to Russia and has set off a low-level civil war in its eastern border region. By signing the trade...

Russia's foreign minister on Saturday accused the United States of encouraging Ukraine to challenge Moscow and heavily weighing in on the European Union. Speaking in televised remarks Saturday, Sergey Lavrov said that "our American colleagues still prefer to push the Ukrainian leadership toward a confrontational path." He added that chances for settling the Ukrainian crisis would have been higher if it only depended on Russia and Europe. Ukraine on Friday signed a free-trade pact with the EU, the very deal that a former Ukrainian president dumped under pressure from Moscow in November, fueling huge protests that eventually drove him from...

Footage has emerged of a white Mil Mi-24 helicopter allegedly being used in Ukraine's antiterror operation against pro-Russian separatists near the Donetsk Oblast city of Kramatorsk. Three further combat Mi-24 helicopters and one transport Mi-8 helicopter bearing the UN logo were spotted in the region by the Russian news outlet Life News. The UN has distanced itself from the footage below [video at URL], stating that, as Ukraine is a contributor to the organisation's forces, it must remove any UN insignia when the materials are returned. A spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon said that any use of peacekeeping equipment,...

KYIV, June 21 /Ukrinform/. The United States does not rule out that Russia is accumulating tanks on the border with Ukraine in order to support separatist militants. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said this at a briefing on Friday, a Ukrinform correspondent reported. "We are confident, as we said last Friday, that Russia last week sent takes and rocket launchers from a deployment site in southwest Russia into eastern Ukraine. We have information that additional tanks have been prepared for departure from this same deployment site, and that's more recently," Psaki said. In addition, she said, the State Department has...

Germany’s president says his compatriots shouldn’t always reject deploying the military to help resolve conflicts as he underlines calls for the country to take more international responsibility. […] President Joachim Gauck told Deutschlandfunk radio in an interview broadcast Saturday that he understands Germans’ longstanding reluctance to take a leading international role, but the country is now a “solid and reliable democracy.” He said that in defending human rights and innocent lives “it is sometimes necessary to take up arms.” …

Talk along the lines of Hillary, Hillary, Hillary dominated the network news shows Sunday, as hosts and their guests mulled Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, excerpts from her forthcoming memoir Hard Choices and her potential 2016 presidential bid. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace countered praise of Clinton from Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., by listing some of Clinton’s troubles as President Barack Obama’s top diplomat. Wallace singled out developments in U.S. relations during Obama’s first term with Russia, Iran and Syria."She defended Syria’s President Assad as a possible reformer at the start of that country’s civil war," he...

There is a growing consensus that Vladimir Putin has abandoned his campaign to take control of east Ukraine. The fog of war, such as the killing of nearly 20 Ukrainian soldiers yesterday, is obscuring the distinct turn in the tide. Putin’s goal has changed from dismantling Ukraine as a united state to destabilizing Sunday’s presidential election in the east. Ukraine has a chance for a third lease on life.

Youtube video - 26 mins. and 12 secs. February 2014, Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution against the government of Viktor Yanukovych had reached another stalemate after the violence in late January. But on the 18th, massive and fatal clashes broke out between police and protesters outside the Ukrainian parliament building, the Rada. After hours of fierce fighting, the protesters were pushed back onto their last lines of defense in Independence square and just about forced the police back after an attempt to clear the square. Once the dust had settled almost 30 police and protesters had been killed, on a day where...

Writing in "Mein Kampf," Hitler referred to the German surrender at the end of World War I and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles as the "greatest villainy of the century," calling those responsible "miserable and degenerate criminals" who "were ready to sacrifice the whole nation, and, if necessary, to let Germany be destroyed; and in my eyes this made them ripe for hanging." He asked, "how could this deed be justified to future generations?" Putin employed similar terminology in discussing the fall of the Soviet Union: "Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a...

NATO believes they are setting up a base of operations against Russia in the Ukraine. Saudi Arabia is recruiting jihadists from across Europe, with 5000 to be in Ukraine, armed and trained both in Poland and Ukraine, in a month. However, command of this force falls, not to Kiev or even Langley but to the most extreme elements fighting in Syria and Iraq. NATO and now Saudi Arabia are establishing the Ukraine as a base of operations for Al Qaeda, AQIU (Al Qaeda In Ukraine). Many of those recruited are from veterans of the Syrian war, having survived the infighting...

While visiting Ukrainian troops out east, Acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov wrote on his Facebook page that his office’s investigation of Serhiy Kurchenko, previously known as Ukraine’s youngest billionaire, revealed that his schemes with petroleum products cost the country Hr 26 billion, or $2.2 billion. Avakov said: “I told them (people in Luhansk Oblast's Svatovo) that Kurchenko’s scams with petroleum products cost the country Hr 26 billion last year alone, and that they were done with false re-export and fake invoices.”

The Czech defense minister says his country does not want to host foreign NATO troops on its soil, as part of plans to beef up the alliance’s eastern wing in light of the Ukraine crisis in contrast to some other eastern European countries like Poland. Martin Stropinsky, the Czech defense minister, has said his country is not in favor of any foreign troops being based in his country, even though they would only come at Prague’s invitation, Reuters reports. “We know well how any permanent stationing (of troops) is still a problem. I belong to a generation that experienced the...

This is Part 2 in a series on the terrorist threat out of Russia &#0150 a strange ally. Part 1. Politically Correct Butchers of the Twentieth Century Part 2. Russia: Bear Trap Alliance? Part 3. Russia: Ally of U.S. or bin Laden? Part 4. A Model Potemkin Village Part 5. Out of the Rubble - The New SOviet Union Read Part 1 of our look at Terrorist Russia. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in his 1835 classic, "Democracy in America," displayed remarkable insight regarding the nature and destiny of Russia, as contrasted with the nature and destiny of the United States. ...