Ukraine conscripts protest at training site demanding uniforms and footwear

© EPA/TASS/IVAN BOBERSKYY

    

Hundreds of mobilized soldiers on Monday blocked the military posts at a Yavorov firing range in western Ukraine's Lviv region, the scene of the Ukrainian-US exercises, demanding to be given uniform and footwear, local media reports have said.

"People were mobilized two weeks ago, but they still look like "tramps." Men complain that no one deals with them although they do not want to sit idle and claim that over the past 14 days they have fired just 10 rounds of ammunition," a source told the Segodnya newspaper.

The incident has prevented the civil personnel working at the training site from reaching their workplace, a source said.

The commanders can hardly appease the angry military men. "All this comes amid the US-Ukrainian drills, with the participation of Ukraine's National Guard soldiers," the source said.

Around 300 US paratroopers arrived in western Ukraine's Lvov in mid-April to train Ukrainian servicemen to conduct combat actions.

The agreement on the training mission was reached by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US Vice President Joe Biden. Some 900 members of Ukraine's National Guard will participate in the exercises. There will be three rounds of training of 300 Ukraine's National Guard troops, and each of the period will last for eight weeks.

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For the West, reality is 'Russian propaganda'

© Russian Insider
It's an old game.

    

The , or FAZ, has dedicated an article to Sputnik News, dismissing it as a "propaganda channel" under the headline "All the news to Putin's taste". Funny, because many readers probably know FAZ as "that awful German newspaper that was infiltrated by the CIA."

The Frankfurt-based daily, peddling news to Washington's taste, writes: "After the news channel 'Russia Today' there is now a new Putin media toy. The digital web satellite of the Kremlin is called 'Sputnik News'. It will provide the world with Russian propaganda".

To dismiss Russian news as propaganda has been German mainstream media's favorite pastime since the Ukraine crisis began. Here is what FAZ calls news, massaging the causes that led to the Odessa tragedy on 2 May, 2014:

In the beginning, nationalistic football fans and pro-Russian activists beat each other up in the city center. Then they started shooting at each other. And at the end flames appeared from the windows of the Trade Union building. Dozens of people suffocated insider. All of them pro-Russian.

Nowhere in six pages did it occur to FAZ to ask why all the victims were pro-Russian.

Reading on, FAZ's reconstruction of the events gets even more entertaining:

Approximately 1,500 people, male football fans and pro-Ukrainian activists, started marching on the city Centre at 15:00. A few dozen guys from the pro-Russian people militia gathered a few blocks away with masks and batons. (...) The police, not many of them, tried to keep the two groups away from each other. Yet the pro-Russian activists attacked.

© Reuters / Yevgeny Volokin
People wait to be rescued on upper storeys at the trade union building in Odessa May 2, 2014.

    

Outnumbered 100 to one, and kept away by police — "not many," admits FAZ, but hey, people were just shooting at each other... — dozens of pro-Russian activists apparently managed to attack 1,500 pro-Ukrainians!

This is how the "Odessa tragedy" began, according to FAZ - fittingly, on April 1st. Nice joke.

Quoting unnamed Odessa-based "independent investigators", FAZ explains how the flames started: "pro-Russian activists made the fatal mistake of locking themselves into the building with petrol and bottles to prepare Molotov cocktails".

We at RI published footage showing thugs throwing Molotov's cocktails at the Trade Union building. Such footage is widely available online. Will German media like FAZ ever catch up?

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, FAZ has made a fool of itself with this kind of wretched reporting. Taking Kiev's word at face value, while dismissing Moscow's counterclaims as "propaganda", has been FAZ's standard operating procedure.

On the eve of Ukraine's October general elections, FAZ did an article on the rise of radicals like Oleh Lyashko under the headline "A longing for Peace in Ukraine"! What?

FAZ then blamed Ukraine's far-right on Moscow, claiming that "the longer Putin's war in Donbass lasts, the more popular the radicals become in Ukrainian politics". Incredible.

The 'peace loving' neo-Nazis in Kiev

    

On February 22nd, FAZ published a disgraceful hit piece about "Moscow's new nationalism" headlined "The Nonsense with the Russian language".

The article started with: "Who speaks Russian, is Russian. So legitimates Moscow its aggressions [note the plural] against immediate neighbors [plural again]". Sure.

FAZ has developed a glossary to deal with Russia and the Ukraine crisis that would put US spokeswomen Psaki & Harf to shame.

Nearly every article features "aggression", "Putin's war", etc. - usually in a subliminal fashion, unrelated to the headline.

Consequently, many Germans have abandoned mainstream media for alternative and social media.

According to a representative survey commissioned February 2015 by ZAPP, a Media TV Magazine broadcast by NDR/ARD, 63% of Germans have "little or no trust" in their media. Almost as many do not trust coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

While the German mainstream blather on about "Russian propaganda", their viewers call German media Lügenpress, "Lying press", voted in 2014 as the best bad word and chanted during protest rallies.

Returning to the FAZ article on Sputnik: It essentially revolves around the usual allegations of "Putin's trolls", "conspiracy theorists", "Kremlin's media offensive", etc.

,Putin's trolls" are readers who post unsympathetic comments in the online versions of German newspapers. On average 80% of these comments are critical of the article content.

"Conspiracy theorists" are those (many) Germans who believe that Maidan was a staged protest, aimed at accomplishing a coup.

"Media offensive" is the publishing of these and related views.

Then there are those who believe that FAZ is a CIA media toy. A book arguing precisely that topped Germany's best-selling list last year. Its author, Udo Ulfkotte, was a veteran foreign correspondent for FAZ. We broke the news last year with an exclusive interview.

At the end of last year another book on the same topic by Mathias Broeckers made it to Germany's top ten. Its title — "We are the good guys - How the Media manipulate us" — leaves little room for further comment.

Early this year, yet another book, "Understanding Russia: the struggle for the Ukraine, and the arrogance of the West", by former ARD Moscow Correspondent Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, hit the market. It provides reader with background so often omitted by FAZ and Co.

Germans are devouring such books, all the while leaving newspapers in the kiosks.

FAZ's article on Sputnik, however, approaches objectivity when it finally mentions key people like Dmitri Kisselov and Margarita Simonjan, directors at Rossiya Segodnya, which owns Sputnik.

Kisselov is quoted as saying: "Sputnik shows the way to a multipolar world, based on paying attention to each country's interests, culture, history and tradition".

Hence the reader finds out what Sputnik is about from its creators — and not only its detractors — only towards the end of the article.

Such a clumsy way to structure an article is nothing new for Germany's leading newspapers.

It was satirized during a September, 2014 episode of Die Anstalt as "a well-tried strategy — put a statement in the headline and leave journalistic standards for the final sentence."

This is what FAZ's article on Sputnik boils down to.

A statement in the headline: "Sputnik is a Propaganda Channel". The journalistic standards — not many — can only be found in the final sentence.

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The EU has lost control of Europe - German Media

© Flickr / Álvaro Millán

    

The EU is increasingly becoming weaker and unable to control processes taking place on its soil. The European continent is becoming a playground for two major powers - the US and Russia - which seek to expand their influence in the region.

The EU is no longer able to control processes taking place on the European continent as its policy is dictated by the US-led NATO, and its governments are mere audience members, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten reported.

According to the newspaper, Angela Merkel's government is weakened because of the spying scandal, while the EU itself is no longer a community of values, but a purely economic community, in which all parties are trying to balance their respective egoism.

The EU is helpless when conflicts emerge on European soil. Be it Greece, Ukraine and Macedonia, the EU governments proved unable to make efficient decisions and are acting as observers.

This is, for instance, true for the conflict in Ukraine, where the US forced European governments to impose economic sanctions against Russia, one of the most important trading partners for many EU countries.

Now, the EU has to pay twice. On the one hand, European businesses suffer significant losses because of the Russian counter-sanctions. On the other hand, European taxpayers have to finance new loans to keep Ukraine's economy afloat.

According to the newspaper, the EU is becoming a playground for the two big players - Russia and the US, which are trying to expand their respective spheres of influence in the region. Europe is a huge energy market where the US wants to export their fracking technology and Russia seeks to secure its gas exports.

It is unlikely that the two opponents will have a monopoly, but even without it, both can earn good money, the article said.

Thus, the newspaper wrote, US official Victoria Nuland's scandalous statement "F**ck the EU" seems to have become a reality. This negative tendency is, however, the logical consequence of the EU's contradictory development, which results from the paradox of overconfidence and internal disunity inside the community, DWN reported.

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Herd of elephants trample man to death in Bengal, India

Soren was gored to death by the elephants

    

With shrinking forests owing to increasing human pressure, the man-animal conflict is on the rise. The latest in this regards is the killing of a man by a wild elephant in the forests of Bankura district of West Bengal on Monday.

This unfortunate incident occurred in Gokul Mathura village under Barjora Forest Range in the district when a herd of elephants gored a man to death in Bankura district, said a forest official.

He said that an old man whose name was Biswanath Soren and was around 65 years old, was sleeping under bamboo thickets on the edge of forest when a herd of at least a dozen elephants while passing through the area attacked him.

Soren was gored to death by the elephants, said Divisional Forest Officer of Bankura (North).

Earlier in April, a forest guard was killed in tusker attack in Onda under Panchet Forest Division in Bankura district.

Prior to the present incident, a forest official was attacked and injured by an elephant in Jalpaiguri district on Sunday (May 10).

Referring to the Sunday's incident, a forest official said that a herd of elephants had entered the Bhandiguri tea estate. While efforts were on by forest staff to drive them away, range officer Sanjay Dutta was attacked by one of the elephants. He sustained minor injuries on his hand, said a forest official of the Jalpaiguri forest division.

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Sinkhole suddenly appears in Drammen, Norway

The sinkhole in Drammen

    

Two trees disappeared one and a half meter into the ground as a sinkhole suddenly appeared outside the entrance to the college BI at Greenland in Drammen Thursday night.The sinkhole outside the building Papirbredden, which includes the economic college BI and the college of Buskerud and Vestfold, was five times five meters.

The depth is estimated to be one and a half meters as two trees at the site fell one and a half meters into the ground.It was the police themselves who discovered the sinkhole when a police car passed the place just before 22.30pm, writes the local newspaper

.An eyewitness informs local newspaper that the ground just collapsed while the paper's own reporter mentioned that the hole was several meters deep- It looks like a big mud pool and several meters deep.

The lapping in this deep pool, the newspaper said. Emergency services created first major security roadblocks but narrowed later in the evening the size.

Police kept watch at the site until Friday, when a geologist will investigate the ground around the hole.Southern Buskerud Police District Operations leader Trond Egil Groth says to the newspaper that Drammen river are very close and that there may be water there which trickles into the hole, but that it is too early to say anything about what has happened.

According to police, there is a well that is 90 meters below ground at the site, and there is also a moraine area. This may have created the hole, said the police.

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Another Ukrainian PM calls for regime change in Kiev

© AP Photo / Efrem Lukatsky

    

If the government fails to tackle the problems confronting Ukraine, it needs to be replaced, a battalion commander-turned-MP warned in televised comments Friday.

"Unfortunately, I haven't seen any real changes happening here since August of last year, where it comes to our national security, defense or economics," Semen Semenchenko, the ex-commander of the Donbass voluntary battalion and now a Verkhovna Rada deputy, said during the Shuster Live talk show aired on Friday.

If the state fails to perform its constitutional duties then "it's time for the people to join in the process of governance," Semenchenko said.

If the powers-that-be prove unable to change anything, the Ukrainians should not "feel depressed" but move quickly to change the government, the MP warned, adding that the "reset" should last until there was a "sufficient number of adequate and open-minded people" running the country.

According to Semen Semenchenko's interview to Ukrainian ICTV television channel in 2014, his real name is Konstantin Grishin. Born in Sevastopol, Konstantin, who is ethnically Russian, moved to Donetsk where he became notorious for a series of shady dealings as the owner of a satellite television firm.

In the early 2000s Crimean police put him on their wanted list for committing a serious crime.

Grishin was never arrested and eventually cropped up in Kiev where he became actively involved in the 2014 Maidan coup.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war in eastern Ukraine, he organized the Donbass voluntary battalion which he led in combat against the pro-independence militia in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.

Semenchenko made his entry into national politics prior to the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election. Appearing second on the party list of Samopomich, he was elected to the Verkhovna Rada.

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Dump truck hangs over edge of huge sinkhole in Niagara Falls, New York

© Scott Lasker
Sinkhole in Niagara Falls

    

Scott Lasker sent WKBW this incredible picture of a sinkhole in Niagara Falls.

Lasker says the roughly 8-by-12-foot hole opened up right by Rt. 104. The truck is one in his fleet. Lasker is employed by Mallare Enterprises and is working on a state construction job at De Veaux Woods State Park.

There were no injuries.

State Parks officials say the hole opened over an old water cistern that was buried.

The area around the sinkhole has been secured and crews are working to free the dump truck.

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