Journalist Dies In Mysterious Crash, Shortly After Being Accused Of Spying By Turkey

A Lebanese-American reporter working for Iranian channel, Press TV, Serena Shim has been killed in a car crash in Turkey, following her reports of accusations from Turkey’s intelligence agency that she had been “spying.”

 Shim was killed on Sunday as she was on a working mission in Turkey to cover the ongoing war in the strategic Syrian town of Kobani.

ABANDONED PRIPYAT, UKRAINE (IMAGE)

 Pripyat is an abandoned city in northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus. Named for the nearby Pripyat River, Pripyat was founded on 4 February 1970, the ninth nuclear city in the Soviet Union, for theChernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It was officially proclaimed a city in 1979, and had grown to a population of 49,360 before being evacuated a few days after the 26 April 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Though Pripyat is located within the administrative district of Ivankiv Raion, the abandoned city now has a special status within the largerKiev Oblast (province), being administered directly from Kiev. Pripyat is also supervised by Ukraine’s Ministry of Emergencies, which manages activities for the entire Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Refugees In Their Own Country – Ukraine Families Face A Cold Winter (Video)

 The Ukraine civil war has forced thousands of Ukrainians away from their homes and, in the case of Anna, to a hangar in Kiev.

Airlines assess risks above war zones (Video)

Source: http://aljazeera.com/

 The tragedy of Malaysia Airlines MH17, which was shot down over a rebel-held part of Ukraine, has focused world attention on war zones and the skies above them. Airline-industry managers are due to meet in Montreal to discuss the risks of flying over war zones. Al Jazeera’s Daniel Lak reports from the Canadian city.

Deadly hail in Eastern Ukraine

The use of Grad rockets in populated areas is a violation of the laws of war.

Both the Ukrainian army and the insurgent forces have used Grad rockets [AFP]

By: Ole Solvang

Source: http://www.aljazeera.com/

“When we first heard one explosion we ran to the basement. And then suddenly, boom, boom, boom – countless explosions. I will never forget that sound.”

With a broken hand and shrapnel still lodged in her chest, Sveta, 55, had just survived a multiple rocket attack on her village when I met her in a hospital in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine this week. The attack destroyed her house and forced most of the villagers to leave. Our investigation shows that Ukrainian armed forces are responsible for at least some of the attacks here that have killed civilians.

‘It is suspicious the plane has deviated from the route it usually takes’ (Video)

 As the world mourns the tragic loss of 298 people in Malaysian Airlines plane crash over Ukraine, questions have arisen over unusual circumstances of the tragedy. RT talks to Wireless Communications professor Mischa Dohler.

US Ukraine policy risks WWIII

By: Sherwood Ross

Source: http://mwcnews.net/

By subverting the elected government of The Ukraine, President Obama has restarted a dangerous and costly Cold War with Russia that literally threatens life on the planet.

This reckless president, who has already bombed six countries, (Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq) is risking a possible escalation of the Ukraine crisis he helped foster, into World War III against Russia.

Victoria Nuland, Mr. Obama’s Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, stated at a Washington conference last Dec. 13 that since 1991 the U.S. has invested $5 billion in Ukraine to install “a good form of democracy.”

But in a recent article published by Global Research, Bill Van Auken identified the “good democrats” the U.S. has been aiding in The Ukraine as those responsible for last February’s “fascist-led coup that installed an unelected ultra-nationalist government in which neo-Nazis from the Right Sector and the Svoboda party hold prominent positions.”

Paul Craig Roberts, of the Institute For Political Economy and former high treasury official under President Reagan, has written the U.S. objective in the current crisis “is to restart the Cold War by forcing the Russian government to occupy the Russian-speaking areas of present day Ukraine where protesters are objecting to the stooge anti-Russian government installed in Kiev by the American coup.”

The heightened tensions, says The Nation in its May 19th editorial, “will almost certainly result in a new nuclear arms race, a prospect made worse by Obama’s provocative public assertion that ‘our conventional forces are significantly superior to the Russians.’”

Russian authority Professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign, says the U.S./NATO/European Union “are promoting the destabilization and the breakup of Ukraine in order to achieve the NATO goal of moving into Ukrainian territory closer to Russia.” The U.S., for a long time, has been attempting to get The Ukraine into NATO, he noted.

Obama now has broken the promise President George H.W. Bush gave to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that if he agreed to the reunification of Germany, NATO would move no farther east, toward Russia’s boundaries, Boyle said. He adds, “The Obama administration and NATO are maneuvering humanity into a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis right on the borders of Russia. Can World War III be far behind?”

Author Roberts said NATO official Alexander Vershbow, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, told reporters NATO has given up on “drawing Moscow closer” and soon will deploy a large number of combat forces in Eastern Europe. And so the dreaded Cold War, with all its staggering cost, with all its immeasurable weight of fear, begins again.

One wonders what the U.S. reaction might be to a Russian warning that it was going to station armies in Mexico or Canada? It should not be forgotten that Russian foreign policy in recent years has been one of peaceful contraction while President Obama’s has been one of violent expansion.  This is reflected in the official figures for military spending last year compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The U.S., it reports, spent $640 billion of a world total of $1747 billion, or 37% of all. After the U.S. came China, $188 billion; Russia $88 billion; Saudi Arabia, $67 billion and France $61 billion. U.S. arms spending is now greater than the next nine nations combined.

And while Russia has fewer than a dozen military bases world-wide, most of them built in former Soviet territory, the U.S. has more than 1,000 bases, in addition to 1,000 located on its own soil.

Given the fact that the U.S. is pounding on Moscow’s door; that it is actively engaged in half a dozen shooting wars; that it has 1,000 military bases abroad; that it leads the world in military spending by a wide margin; and that it has spent $5 billion to aid the neo-Nazis in an overthrow by force and violence in The Ukraine; it is hard to disagree with Roberts when he asserts “Washington has no intention of allowing the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved.”