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Here we go again with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry leveraging a tragedy to make another "strong case" based on limited evidence. We have already seen this in the case of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and chemical weapons. Now it's Russian President Vladimir Putin's turn for the global smear treatment. Presumably we're supposed to rush to adopt the notion that Russia's fingerprints are all over last week's downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine -- just as we were supposed to buy into Kerry's story last year about the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons against his own...

RT has two cameras on a split screeen, overlooking Gaza. You can hear the 'crump' of mortars or artillery, and the whine of at least two drones in the air. It is just before the dawn there. You can hear the call to prayer in the background, right now.

Another piece of evidence to support the theory that this administration thinks it’s doing a terrific job, on every front, all the time: David Axelrod ✔ @davidaxelrod Remember not long ago when some folks in DC were almost in awe of Putin's moxy and cunning? He's not looking so slick now. 9:05 AM - 21 Jul 2014 Washington, DC, United States 265 Retweets 147 favoritesFirst, it’s spelled ”moxie.”Second, Obama and his fans love to blur the lines between acknowledging Putin’s ruthlessness and willingness to act, with little fear of consequence, with some sort of admiration for him. Remember when this...

Russia could ask its richest citizens to help foot the bill for the annexation of Crimea by paying a "solidarity tax" proposed by a group of lawmakers. Deputies from the State Duma lower house of parliament, which is dominated by backers of President Vladimir Putin, have drawn up a draft law that would increase income tax for people earning more than more than 1 million roubles ($28,700) a month. It would affect less than 2 percent of the working population but the amounts could be huge for some individuals because the daft proposes they pay up to 30 percent of...

First, Vladimir Putin suppresses — sometimes violently — virtually all dissent in Russia. And most Russians are apparently entirely comfortable with it. Not just comfortable — supportive. Second, there is widespread nostalgia among Russian citizens for Stalin. One has to wonder if there is any other example of a large body of people pining for a leader who murdered tens of millions of their own people. Third, there is increasingly little difference between the Russian media and the Soviet media. Both were/are saturated with lies. Anne Applebaum, foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post, reports that "Russia's state-controlled mass media...

In the wake of the shoot-down of the Malaysian Airlines plane over Ukraine, various pundits continue to say it is unlikely that Europe will do much about it. But why? It is just a lack of will? Or something else? The evidence is being ignored by most of the media, but it continues to indicate that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is an agent, or at least a stooge, of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. In an extraordinary development, the office of the President of Russia reports that Putin said on Wednesday that the German Chancellor is “a reputable European leader under whose...

... Politically, participants in the U.S.-Russia Forum included figures from the left, such as Stephen Cohen, a professor from New York University and Princeton University, and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine. But people also came from Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine and the Ron Paul Institute. In the past, the Russians could only count on support from the “progressive” side of the American political spectrum. Figures from the American conservative movement are now on the Putin bandwagon.

As of Tuesday night, despite the efforts of international intermediaries here in the region, there was no sign of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Visiting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had failed to achieve the long-term humanitarian truce he planned. This despite signs Monday that Hamas might want to halt the fighting. The Al-Mayadeen satellite station, which has good contacts in the office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, claimed late Monday that Abbas and Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashaal had reached a ceasefire deal, based on Egypt’s proposal for an immediate cessation of hostilities. Abbas’s intelligence chief Majid Faraj set...

The European Union on Tuesday called upon terrorist groups in Gaza to disarm, and to end and renounce violence. The official statement read: "The EU strongly condemns the indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israel by Hamas and militant groups in the Gaza Strip, directly harming civilians. These are criminal and unjustifiable acts. The EU calls on Hamas to immediately put an end to these acts and to renounce violence. All terrorist groups in Gaza must disarm. The EU strongly condemns calls on the civilian population of Gaza to provide themselves as human shields."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has called for an end to the fighting and bombing in Gaza. “Both sides must distinguish between combatants and noncombatants, and Israel must ensure that its use of force is proportionate in accordance with international humanitarian law. More immediately, all combat operations must stop, and Israeli troops should withdraw from Gaza,” Carter said in a statement released Tuesday. So far, more than 600 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in the fighting, according to reports. The Israeli death toll is estimated at 29, including two civilians. Humantarian groups have also called for an end to...

Vladimir Putin is hoping to get away with murder. Last week a civilian airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a sophisticated anti-aircraft missile system, and 298 innocent people died as a result. Simple logic and all the early evidence to point to Russia as the guilty party, but Putin smugly believes that he will get off scot-free. And he has good reasons to think so. He enjoys strong support from a gullible and fiercely nationalistic Russian public that uncritically believes the Kremlin’s propaganda. The militants who almost certainly brought down Malaysian Airways Flight MH 17 with Russian support...

International monitors, who only recently gained access to the site, discovered the cockpit of the plane apparently cut in half with diesel-powered saws. Michael Bociurkiw, spokesman for the group of international monitors from the Organize for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), told USA Today: 'The rear part of the aircraft, one of the biggest intact pieces, has definitely been hacked into'. The cockpit was found on land which was immediately cordoned off by Russian-backed separatists during the two days after the plane was blown out of the sky. However, both the separatists and Russia have denied any involvement in...

usatoday.com cannot be posted due to copyright complaint http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/07/22/ukraine-mh17-bodies-russia/12981325/

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday that Russia was responsible for "creating the conditions" that led to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but they offered no evidence of direct Russian government involvement. The intelligence officials were cautious in their assessment, noting that while the Russians have been arming separatists in eastern Ukraine, the U.S. had no direct evidence that the missile used to shoot down the passenger jet came from Russia. The officials briefed reporters Tuesday under ground rules that their names not be used in discussing intelligence related to last week's air disaster, which killed 298...

Twitter is quick, but too quick sometimes – recently it burst with photos of an evil Ukrainian militiaman who took a teddy bear from the victim of Malaysia plane crash as a trophy. But the full video shows he was just paying the tribute to the dead. “Pro Russian holds up stuffed toy like trophy. Mr @PutinRF_Eng, are you proud of your compatriots?" wrote a twitter user John Gosling. A photo signed “pro-Russian fighter holds up a toy found among the debris at the crash site of MH17” has been used by such major media outlets as the BBC and...

Former Republican Rep. Ron Paul said Sunday that the United States shares part of the blame in the attack on the Malaysian Airlines passenger jet in eastern Ukraine last week, and that theObama administration may try and use the tragedy as an excuse to attack Russia.

Did you know Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam? Did you know that, for some darkly inexplicable reason, on July 17, MH17 moved off the standard flight path that it had taken every time before, and moved north, toward rebel-held areas outside Donetsk? Or that the dispatchers summoned the plane lower just before the crash? Or that the plane had been recently reinsured? Or that the Ukrainian army has air defense systems in the area? Or that it was the result of the Ukrainian military mistaking MH17 for Putin’s presidential plane, which...

Almost eight years after Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer turned whistle-blower, was poisoned in London with a radioactive isotope, the British authorities announced on Tuesday that a public inquiry would be held into his death, permitting investigators to explore whether Russian leaders ordered the killing. At a time when President Vladimir V. Putin faces mounting Western opprobrium for his support of pro-Russia separatists accused of shooting down a Malaysia Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine, the announcement from Theresa May, the British home secretary, could be seen by Moscow as a further rebuke. “It is more than seven years...

MH17 and Moscow’s Magical Mystery Jets By Mark Galeotti After a weekend of virtual silence—while elements of the Russian media tried to fill the infospace with all kinds of lurid and rapidly-debunked rumor and conjecture—Monday saw Moscow hit back at the allegations that Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by separatist rebels with Russian government assistance. Beyond President Putin’s strangely constrained personal statement (not the body language of a man at all comfortable with the situation), a key element were the “ten questions” posed by Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov, chief of the General Staff’s Main Operations Directorate and Lt....

The bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie was premeditated mass murder. Gadhafi was taking revenge for Reagan's raid on Tripoli in 1986. The downing of KAL 007, flying from Anchorage to Seoul, was mass murder in the second degree. Seeing an aircraft intrude into Russian air space, Soviet officers brutally ordered it shot down. The downing of the Malaysian airliner that took the lives of 298 men, women and children was not deliberate terrorism. No one wanted to massacre those women and children. It was a horrendous military blunder, like the U.S. shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus by the...