© Reuters / Shamil Zhumatov
It was like one of the illicit apartment concerts from Soviet days, only with better cocktails. Dozens of young people packed into a basement room, singing along to classic Russian and Ukrainian tunes strummed out by a rotating cast of guitarists.
They had gathered to say goodbye to Izba Chitalnya ("village reading room"), Donetsk's hippest cafe-bar, which was closing due to poor business as a result of the ongoing conflict in eastern
Ukraine. When they belted out the first lines of the beloved No One Will Hear by the Russian band Chaif - "I haven't heard from my old friends, it's sad, and the daily newspaper leaves my soul empty" - it was almost as if they were singing about the turmoil in their own city.
It has been three months since pro-Russian protesters seized the Donetsk regional administration building, sparking the most serious separatist conflict in the former Soviet Union since it fell apart in 1991. At least 423 people have died, according to a June estimate by the UN.
The upshot for Donetsk, once a city of a million people, is as much psychological as physical.
Tens of thousands have fled and hundreds of businesses have closed. A surreal atmosphere pervades the city centre, where ATMs have run out of cash, shops shut early, and it is not uncommon to see men with machine guns posted outside a sushi restaurant or behind the wheel of a city ambulance. People strive to live as normally as possible: on one memorable occasion this month when a firefight endured for hours near the regional police headquarters, locals blithely went about their business in nearby districts as if they couldn't hear the shooting.
Comment: The Daily Mail is right to highlight these three central figures in the Labor governments of the 90s and 2000s and their alleged involvement in institutionalizing pedophilia from the top down, but this phenomenon spans the entire political-media-security-financial-entertainment establishment in the UK, so this may be part of an effort by the incumbent right-wing Tory government to deflect attention from its members' roles:
British celebrity icon Jimmy Savile sexually abused up to a thousand children on BBC premises
Forget Savile, pedophiles are everywhere in the British entertainment industry
Jimmy Savile scandal exposes pedophile network at heart of British establishment
Update 7 July 2014
...and now we can add another iconic BBC TV children's presenter, artist Rolf Harris:
Rolf Harris gets 6 years for sexually abusing multiple children, third iconic BBC children's TV presenter-pedophile sentenced in two years
But he was just a sacrificial lamb to the wolves... the real scandal surfacing again in the UK is an interlocking network of pedophiles in the Houses of Parliament and the City of London:
About 40 politicians on UK pedophile ring: Report
Home Office 'loses' pedophile dossier naming 'big names'