Every Museum desires to do educational outreach, and the Museum-Panorama of the Battle of Stalingrad is no exception. (Visit its site here) On January 22, it hosted a Round Table discussion with actual survivors of the historic battle. These old soldiers, still resident in the Volgograd region, Maxim Matveyevich Zagorulko, Alexander Kolotushkin, Maria V. Sokolov, Mikhail Tereshchenko, Eugene F. Rogov, and Alexander Yakovlevich Sirotenko, in their late 80's or even early 90's, looked at the present world as well as at the past, and produced an open letter, a "letter of the living" to the Chancellor of Germany. The full text is on several Russian language sites. Their letter follows, in English.

Letter of the Living to Frau Angele Dorothea Merkel from the Veterans of the Stalingrad Battle

Dear Frau Merkel,

Here in the 70th year after the victory over Nazism, we, veterans of that terrible war and participants in that most horrible combat, are aware that a spectre again is haunting Europe, a spectre of the Brown Plague. This time it is Ukraine that has become the nursery of Nazism, where from the fountainhead of an ideology in ultranationalism, antisemitism, and inhumaneness, there have come into practice rejections of other cultures, physical violence, elimination of dissenters, and murders motivated by ethnic hatred.

The leader of the pro-Russia forces in eastern Ukraine has announced that their side is to be reinforced by 100,000 more fighters by spring.

"In 10 days, we will begin a general mobilization," Alexander Zakharchenko said, according to the semi-official Donetsk News Agency, adding, "We plan to mobilize up to 100,000 people."

On January 20, Ukraine conducted the fourth wave of mobilization of its armed forces since the conflict in eastern regions started. Another two waves are planned for April and June.

According to Ukraine's Minister of Defense Stepan Poltorak, a total of 104,000 Ukrainians will be mobilized throughout 2015.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, will go on trial in Lille on Monday accused of pimping, in a case that threatens to expose the double life of the politician once tipped to be the next president of France.

The court is expected to hear how, while in Washington holding the most senior economic job in the world, Strauss-Kahn had group sex with prostitutes brought to him in Europe and the US, organised by French businessmen friends who wanted to curry favour with the man they thought would one day lead the country.

Details from court papers filed by the investigative magistrates and reported by several French papers referenced more than 15 "soirées" between 2009 and 2011 in which Strauss-Kahn was described as the instigator and "king of the party", and where he allegedly had multiple encounters with numerous women in scenes described by some witnesses as "carnage" or "slaughter".

Since the beginning of time, television pundits and other serious thinkers have beckoned the young to die or lose limbs in pointless, illegal wars.

Just in the last 15 years alone, our groomed foreign policy experts and think tank fellows have made compelling cases for armed humanitarian interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and about a half dozen other defenseless nations desperately in need of drone strikes or some other form of Western aid.

Some might think this ancient practice of the privileged few urging everyone else to perish for nothing is outdated - maybe even harmful.

Perhaps. But tradition is very important in the United Kingdom. Well-placed sources tell us that wooden mallet-spankings at Eton College are just as regular as they were 100 years ago.

We are beginning to drift into less savory subjects, so let us return to the main agenda item: Writing in The Guardian, Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash has demanded more weapons for Ukraine, and more hostile, Draconian measures levied against Russia. Why? Because Putin is a maniac and "sometimes only guns can stop guns."

A Soros-funded group arguing to replace the U.S. passport with a North American passport appears ready to take up the mantle of championing the concept of a European Union-style regional government to supersede the sovereignty of the United States, Mexico and Canada, fulfilling the dream of the late American University professor Robert Pastor.

The future of the U.S. lies in North America, not in the United States as a sovereign nation, contends the New America Foundation, a Washington-based leftist think-tank with ties to Jonathan Soros, son of famed leftist billionaire George Soros.

Appropriately named "New America," the foundation believes the U.S. passport should soon become obsolete and replaced with a European Union-style passport issued for all citizens of the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Citizens would be redefined by their regional identity as "North Americans," echoing President Obama's claim in Spanish in his December 17, 2014, announcement of his executive actions to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba, "Todos Somos Americanos," or, "We are all Americans.

"The United States, Canada and Mexico are bound by a shared economic, environmental, demographic and cultural destiny. How we move forward together is key to our success," wrote André Martinez, an editor with New America and a professor at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University; and Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, a fellow at New America and a former adviser on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning staff, in an article titled Why we need a North American Passport, published by CNN.com.

"In recognition of our shared destiny, the three countries should create a North American passport that would, over time, allow their citizens to travel, work, invest, learn and innovate anywhere in North America. Work, tourist and student visas are necessities in the modern world to regulate the flow of people between sovereign states," Martinez and Kurtz-Phelan declared.

While the world's attention has been fixed on France in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, the subsequent manhunt, and the political fallout from the incident, a number of important news items have quietly been pushed off the front pages of the world's major newspapers, and out of the lead segments of television news programs all over the globe. In Nigeria, Boko Haram reemerges with a vengeance, committing one of the worst atrocities in the recent history of the region. In Syria and Iraq, the war against the Islamic State continues unabated. In Greece, an all-important election that could have dire implications for the future of the European Union is set to take place.

And quietly, with almost no fanfare from international media, reports surfaced from China indicating that Chinese authorities had arrested at least ten Turkish suspects alleged to have organized and facilitated the illegal border crossings of a number of Uighur [Muslim ethnic group in Western China] extremists. It has further been revealed that the Uighur extremists were planning to travel to Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to train and fight with fellow jihadis.

While the details of the investigation have not been fully revealed as yet, the incident points to a much larger issue than simply a few Turks being involved in document forgery and illegal immigration. Rather, the story is still further evidence of a well-funded, well-organized international terror network operated and/or facilitated by the Turkish government and Turkish intelligence. From the hosting of extremist fighters along the Syrian border to providing material support to terrorists in China, Turkey has placed itself at the center of an international terror war aimed at countries that oppose NATO and stand in the way of the Neo-Ottoman vision that President Erdogan and Prime Minister Davutoglu have for Turkey.

Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered fromTripoli.

The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials' unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi's son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community's concerns.

"You should see these internal State Department reports that are produced in the State Department that go out to the Congress. They're just full of stupid, stupid facts," an American intermediary specifically dispatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Gadhafi regime in July 2011, saying the State Department was controlling what intelligence would be reported to U.S. officials.

At the time, the Gadhafi regime was fighting a civil war that grew out of the Arab Spring, battling Islamist-backed rebels who wanted to dethrone the longtime dictator. Mrs. Clinton argued that Gadhafi might engage in genocide and create a humanitarian crisis and ultimately persuaded President Obama, NATO allies and the United Nations to authorize military intervention.

I don't know who exactly (Turchinov? Poroshenko?) commanded the Ukrainian army to disrupt the truce. But I am sure that this decision was taken in Washington.

It is not an accident that this suicidal provocation was preceded by the visit of G. Soros to Kiev. This elderly "philanthropist" who, together with the US Department of State, sponsored all post-soviet fascist regimes (from Saakashvili's Georgia to Poroshenko's Ukraine), was most qualified to assess the financial state of the regime in Kiev and to decide whether it still makes sense to continue prolongation of the agony by monetary injections. His public statement, reprinted by media on January 14, left no doubt - the patient is dead, the corpse is stiff, its resuscitation is meaningless.

Surely, Kiev has understood that if they scrape the bottom of the barrel and if Europe exerts itself then it is possible to collect money for further agony. But Soros clearly said about the necessity to find $50 billion just for 2015. While in 2014 (when the ignoramuses still hoped for the stabilization of the Kiev regime) US, EU and IMF together could scrape up only $20 billion, supposed to be stretched over 3 years. In fact, in 2014 Kiev got only $7.5 - 8 billion in credits. Clearly, in such conditions it is unrealistic to find $50 billion in a year. Soros himself told that he hopes only for a miracle.

Right after Soros' unambiguous demand for the EU to finance Ukraine, the European media coverage of the Ukrainian crisis changed drastically, and it became clear that there will be no miracle. The European mass media (including German TV) and NGO's (including Human Rights Watch) suddenly "saw the light" and found that the Kiev regime is at war with civilians, violating the laws and customs of war. Just a little bit longer and Europe will "realize" that Kiev is taken by a fascist junta that tramples its own constitution, and introduce sanctions against Russia for Kremlin's economic cooperation (supply of coal and gas) with the Nazi regime.

Are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers trying to defend his case on the facts at all, or are they just trying to save his life?

Based on the overwhelmingly lopsided advantage the government holds, with a virtual monopoly on investigative evidence, it's safe to assume the latter.

Whether the intent is to deny Tsarnaev a) any infinitesimal chance of proving his case - or even lessening the charges against him - or b) to prevent embarrassing information from leaking out at trial, the government has brought the legal version of "full spectrum dominance" warfare to a knife fight.

But a close look at the nature of the information Tsarnaev's defense team has repeatedly requested from prosecutors in motions to the court suggests Tsarnaev's lawyers are trying to pry loose something about the government's relationship with the Tsarnaevs prior to the bombing on April 15, 2013.

The story of the Boston Marathon Bombing is rife with contradictions, canards, misconceptions and blatant untruths. Boston Wrong is part of WhoWhatWhy's attempt to set the record straight. This is the first in an occasional series of articles debunking the faulty stories and "facts" which persist, despite evidence to the contrary.

Verbal intimations by government officials and a TV re-enactment have given some potential Boston Marathon bombing jurors the mistaken belief they have seen a video of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev setting down a bomb-laden backpack in front of a restaurant.

There's just one problem: that footage has never been made available to the public.

During jury selection on Jan. 26, Juror 186 said she believes Tsarnaev is guilty because of the "surveillance video from Lord & Taylor," a department store across the street from the Forum restaurant. Early media reports suggested that the store's dome surveillance camera captured Tsarnaev dropping his backpack at the spot of the second explosion.