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<p>The Right Sector played a leading role in January's violent anti-Yanukovych protests in Kiev.</p> <p>The Right Sector is the most radical wing of Ukraine's Maidan protest movement that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych in February.</p> <p>Activists claiming to be Right Sector members were involved in Kiev's Maidan protests [link at URL] from late November but the group did not attract much attention until violent clashes with police in central Kiev on 19 January, in which it played a leading role.</p>

Newly discovered emails prove beyond all doubt that the “true purpose” of Hunter Biden’s lucrative deal with a Ukrainian energy company was for Hunter to get “high-ranking US officials” to visit Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” the firm’s primary owner, a notoriously corrupt oligarch with ties to Russia. Documentation of this illegal scheme begins with a widely overlooked email on Hunter’s laptop in which a top executive of the Ukrainian firm describes the plan. Now, emails uncovered by Just Facts prove that Hunter and his partners: explicitly agreed to this deal. concealed...

Excellent interview (youtube video) with Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia, who grew up in New Jersey and he doesn't even have a Jersey accent. :-) Do yourself a favor and watch it.

The prime minister of Kazakhstan unexpectedly announced his resignation Wednesday and was swiftly replaced by his influential predecessor. All three parties in the oil-rich Central Asian nation’s parliament voted to approve Karim Masimov, 49, as the new head of government. …

UNMISS said in a statement that "the armed mob forced entry into the site and opened fire on the internally displaced persons sheltering inside the base". Its forces returned fire -- first firing warning shots and then taking part in a ferocious gun battle -- before the fighters retreated, it added. The civilians had fled into the base weeks ago amid brutal ethnic massacres in the world's newest nation. Information Minister Michael Makuei said that a "huge number" of gunmen had come seeking revenge for the rebel capture of the oil town of Bentiu two days ago hoping to kill...

In an interesting interview [link at URL] to the New York Review of Books, George Soros shared his ideas on many topics including Europe, Russia and the Ukranian crisis. He also presented his new book [link at URL] The tragedy of the European Union: Disintegration or Revival? Whether one agrees or disagrees with Soro's interpretations and arguments, it is hard to deny that the interview is extremely insightful and gives a lot of food for thought. I offer a discussion of the part of the interview devoted to Ukraine. George Soros emphasized the necessity of a large-scale technical and financial...

Secret Service records appear to provide verification of documents regarding conflicts of interest regarding former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and other member of the Biden family. That's according to leading Senate Republicans investigating the matter. The senators, Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), are also questioning representations made to them by the Secret Service regarding its protective detail to Hunter. In a new letter to Secret Service Director James Murray, Johnson and Grassley outline how records they previously obtained from the Secret Service line up with, and seem to provide verification of, newly-public emails about Hunter...

Since the start of the ill-named “Arab Spring,” the Muslim Brotherhood has been very much in the news. Coming to power through democratic elections in Egypt and Tunisia, they were toppled within a short time by the people, who discovered their true intentions. There were some in the West – but not all – who saw the light as well. British Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered a comprehensive review of the movement,... its activities in Britain and its impact on the country’s interests. The decision was made because the Brotherhood is allegedly behind terrorist operations in Egypt, and because...

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This piece is reprinted with permission and can be found on Abrams' blog "Pressure Points" here. The New York Times, whose hostility to Israel is visible in both its news and its editorial ‎pages, was at it again this week. In an editorial (about the symbolic vote in the U.K. ‎parliament backing Palestinian statehood) titled "A British Message to Israel," The ‎Times's editorial board unloaded yet again with a barrage of advice, opinion -- and untruths.‎ Here are some of the key words:‎ "The...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” former Secretary of State John Kerry commented on President Donald Trump’s speech earlier in the day. Trump said the Obama administration’s “foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013, and they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash.”

(Ayad) Allawi, the son of a Shiite businessman, joined the nationalist Baath party when he was a medical student, but in the 1970s, became an opponent of Saddam, who had already begun using brutal methods to steer the country. Today, 11 years after Saddam’s fall, violence, corruption and abuses of power still dominate daily life in Baghdad. Allawi blames Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for this chaos. […] “I have nothing against the Iranian leadership. In fact, I accommodated it often enough during my time as premier. But I am no proponent of a theocracy. I am a secularist. I wanted...

Two leaked tapes have emerged on the internet where Kiev-appointed governor allegedly threatens an ex-presidential candidate who called for a referendum. The official may also be behind the Odessa massacre and Mariupol shootings, the leak adds. On the first tape, which appeared on May 14, an oligarch and governor of the city of Dnepropetrovsk in southeastern Ukraine, Igor Kolomoisky, allegedly called ex-presidential candidate Oleg Tsarev and started threatening him. He told Tsarev to leave Ukraine immediately, saying it was in connection with the killing of Bogdan Shlemkevich, a soldier from Ukraine’s National Guard on May 9 in Mariupol, southeastern Ukraine....

He is Dmitry Firtash, a former fireman and soldier. In little more than a decade, the Ukrainian went from obscurity to wealth and renown, largely by buying gas from Russia and selling it in his home country. His success was built on remarkable sweetheart deals brokered by associates of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, at immense cost to Russian taxpayers, a Reuters investigation shows. Russian government records reviewed for this article reveal for the first time the terms of recent deals between Firtash and Russia's Gazprom, a giant gas company majority owned by the state. According to Russian customs documents detailing...

In February 2017, the Washington Post’s Miller had the lead byline on a story based on leaks of Trump’s conversations with Australia’s prime minister and Mexico’s president. Six months later, the Post published the entire transcripts of both conversations in another Miller story. It was through such national security correspondents that anti-Trump sources -- intelligence officials -- pushed leaks of classified information and other tidbits intended to damage Trump into the media. There it merged with other anti-Trump currents in nearly every corner of the press, where it blossomed into Russiagate. After a nearly two-year investigation, the special counsel found...

Andrew P. Bakaj is the lawyer representing the whistleblower who came forward with information about President Donald Trump and his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about an investigation into 2020 democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The whistleblower’s intel, which has now been turned over to Congress confidentially, pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to announce a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump on September 24, 2019. Lead counsel on this high-profile case is the 36-year-old Bakaj, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, who now works as the founding & managing partner of Compass Rose Legal...

Vice President Biden addressed Ukrainian legislators Tuesday in a committee room of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, where he began his remarks by thanking the legislators for "making me feel relevant again." Biden is in Ukraine to show support for the Ukrainian government as that country faces continued pressure and threats from Russia. Biden's "relevant" comments were a reference to his time as a legislator in the United States: I want to thank my colleagues for bringing me back home. For 36 years I sat in our legislature, and I used to actually have this seat in our -- I...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Russian media on Thursday that former Secretary of State John Kerry approved of Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula, believing the residents were overwhelmingly in favor of “reuniting” with Russia. According to Lavrov, Kerry’s main criticism of Russia’s actions was to suggest holding another referendum to reinforce the legitimacy of annexation. Russia’s RT.com summarized Lavrov’s comments to the RBK news service: I won’t reveal a big secret if I say that John Kerry was telling me in April 2014: ‘Everything is clear. Everything happened the way the Crimean people...

ROME — When Stephen K. Bannon was still heading Breitbart News, he went to the Vatican to cover the canonization of John Paul II and make some friends. High on his list of people to meet was an archconservative American cardinal, Raymond Burke, who had openly clashed with Pope Francis.In one of the cardinal’s antechambers, amid religious statues and book-lined walls, Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon — who is now President Trump’s anti-establishment eminence — bonded over their shared worldview. They saw Islam as threatening to overrun a prostrate West weakened by the erosion of traditional Christian values, and viewed...

The rabbit hole of corruption goes deep! Hunter Biden joins the team of Burisma Holdings http://burisma.com/hunter-biden-joins-the-team-of-burisma-holdings/ Is it Joe Biden’s son? Sure is! https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4SKPB_enUS352US353&q=Joe%20Biden%27s%20sons Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has been appointed to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a privately-owned natural gas company operating in the Ukraine since the year 2002. Burisma Holdings has become a considerable player within the Ukrainian natural gas and oil industry, with licences covering the Dnieper-Donets, Carpathian and Azov-Kuban basins. The production capability has reached over 10,500 barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOEPD) which has left the company with considerable...

Last week, a federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union had filed in 2016 challenging the government’s award of grants to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to provide services to unaccompanied minor illegal aliens and trafficking victims. In the lawsuit, the ACLU argued the grants violated the Establishment Clause because the Department of Health and Human Services allowed the Catholic organization (and its sub-grantees) to deny girls and women in their care contraceptives and abortion. The court rejected the ACLU’s Establishment Clause claim in a methodical 34-page opinion, explaining that the federal funds...