Relations between Russia and Turkey have deteriorated so far it is virtually impossible to normalize them, Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov has declared. Moscow is still expecting an apology from Ankara.

"The relations have now hit their worst state in the past several decades. And we regret to conclude so," Peskov told journalists Thursday, adding that it's not Russia who is to blame for the current situation.

He added that Turkey has committed "aggressively treacherous actions against Russia" in the recent months, alluding to the downing of the Russian Su-24 bomber in November.

The Russian military jet was downed over the Syrian territory while returning to the Khmeimim airbase after being hit by a Turkish air-to-air missile. One of the two Russian pilots, Lieutenant-Colonel Oleg Peshkov, was shot dead by militants while parachuting to the ground, having ejected from the stricken aircraft. His partner, navigator Captain Konstantin Murakhtin, survived, but one Russian Marine in the rescue team who was recovering Murakhtin was killed when the rescue helicopter was destroyed by a tank missile launched by a militia group.

Wouldn't it be a strange world to live in if 50% of military spending was paid for by just 5% of the population?

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Every year, the United States government spends the equivalent of $3,300 for each working citizen on its military budget. In aggregate, this grand total of $610 billion in defense spending amounts to about half of the dollars globally spent on the military.

Moscow provided the Netherlands with radar and other data on the MH17 crash but it has all been ignored, a Russian aviation official said, responding to the relatives of Dutch victims who recently wrote to President Vladimir Putin.

Oleg Storchevoy, the deputy head of Rosaviatsia, the agency representing Russia in the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash investigation, has personally addressed the relatives of the victims in a lengthy letter.

"I would like to emphasize that Russia is strongly committed to establishing the actual cause of the crash, and has consistently done everything in its power to help find out the truth, both throughout the course of the technical investigation and following its official completion," he said.

Desperate for answers that would shed the light on who fired the BUK missile that allegedly hit the passenger plane on July 17, 2014, and dissatisfied with the slow-moving Dutch probe, the relatives have turned to the heads of several states, including Russia's. On January 22, they sent a letter to Putin, asking about the primary data from radars and satellites, which they think is crucial.

"We did not impose any conditions or restrictions regarding further use and disclosure of radar data, records of phone conversations and other data we submitted to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) at its request. Moreover, Russia has stored all that data to this day, and is willing to provide it once again to the relevant authorities," said Storchevoy.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter's speech Tuesday previewing the Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2017 spelled out Washington's advanced preparations for military confrontations with the world's second- and third-largest nuclear powers, Russia and China.

Delivered to the Economic Club of Washington, DC, an appreciative audience whose sponsors include the major arms manufacturers Boeing and Northrop Grumman as well as financial giants like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, the defense secretary's speech presented an unabashed declaration of Washington's intentions to assert its hegemony over the world's markets and resources by whatever means necessary, up to and including a nuclear holocaust.

The presentation made by Carter, a longtime technocrat of America's military industrial complex, provides a powerful vindication of the warnings made by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site that the deepening crisis of US and global capitalism is posing a real and growing danger of a Third World War.

The biggest increase proposed in the Pentagon budget is the quadrupling of funding for the US military buildup against Russia in Europe—projected to rise from $800 million to $3.4 billion. In addition to the 65,000 troops Washington already garrisons on the European continent, the funding increase will pay for the "heel to toe" rotation of full armored combat brigades into the former Baltic republics, on Russia's doorstep, as well as other eastern European countries.

The leader of a Turkish opposition party has condemned the Turkish army operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in the country's southeast, saying Ankara is slaughtering citizens there. "They (Turkish forces) committed a massacre in Cizre, and they don't want to announce it," Selahattin Demirtas, the co-chairman of the left-wing pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), told lawmakers from his party on Tuesday.

Over the past six weeks, the town of Cizre in the southeastern Sirnak Province has been under a curfew as part of the Turkish military operations against PKK militants. People in the Turkish city of Istanbul held a demonstration on Monday to express their outrage at the Cizre curfew. Turkish riot police used water cannon to disperse the protesters.

As many as 100,000 of the 120,000 Cizre inhabitants have fled, according to Faysal Sariyildiz, the local MP from the HDP. A number of other citizens are still trapped in buildings in the restive town. On Sunday, up to 60 wounded people, who had been sheltering in the basement of a building in Cizre, were killed during a military raid. Turkey claimed that high-profile PKK militants had holed up in the cellar.

Demirtas said some 70-90 people had taken refuge in the basement and a few other buildings in Cizre, which were coming under mortar fire. "They are scattering the bodies on the streets, on ruined buildings," he added.

The upcoming meeting between Pope Francis and Russian Patriarch Kirill will not only be a historic religious event, but could also have major benefits to Christians around the world, the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche reported.

In an attempt to defend Christians in the Middle East and other parts of the world where they're being persecuted, Pope Francis wants to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin for help.

According to Pope Francis, Putin is "the only one with whom the Catholic Church can unite to defend Christians in the East."

"It's important to join efforts [with Russia] to save Christianity in all regions [of the world] where it's oppressed," Pope Francis said, as cited by Le Journal Du Dimanche.

In November, during a meeting with President of the European Council Donald Tusk and European Commission Chairman Jean-Claude Juncker, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded from Brussels €30 billion to resolve the European migrant crisis, a leaked document revealed.

The talks took place in Antalya on November 14, 2015. The confidential document has been published by Greek website Euro2Day.

According to it, Erdogan threatened to send migrants to Europe. By that time, the EU and Turkey had agreed a plan on providing €3 billion to Ankara in exchange for assistance in resolving the migrant issue.

However, Erdogan threatened that he would take measures if the EU delayed Turkey's admission to the bloc. Particularly, he said Turkey would put refugees on buses to Europe and the consequences for Europe will be "more than a dead boy" on the Turkish shores.

TV Channel France 2 showed footage of Russian airstrikes in Syria as the work of the US-led international coalition in a fight against Daesh (Islamic State).

While covering news from Syria and reporting about airstrikes against Daesh militants, France 2 showed footage first released by the Russian Defense Ministry.

According to Russian blogger Timofei Vasiliev, the news story said that Russian airstrikes hit civilian targets, as the Russians allegedly don't use precision bombs, instead indiscriminately bombing everything in the area. Unlike the Russians, the French Air Force, which works as part of the US-led coalition, "successfully" bombed Daesh targets, France 2 said.

The French TV channel, however, couldn't find any footage to prove their point, so it just used footage of Russian airstrikes to demonstrate the precision of Western missiles. No big deal, right?

I first heard Ray McGovern speak on a country road in the New England hills. This was courtesy of the admirably dedicated David Barsamian, who broadcast one of McGovern's talks on Alternative Radio in late-2013. Reception up here being spotty, I pulled over and sat watching the autumn clouds drift by for the full hour McGovern stood at the podium of a Methodist church in Seattle. I was rapt.

What a lost pleasure it is in our indispensable nation to be in the presence of someone who thinks, acts and speaks out of conscience and conviction. Even better, these were precisely McGovern's topics that day three years back: The necessity of careful thought, of honoring one's inner voice, of acting out of an idea of what is right without regard to success or failure, the win-or-lose of life. One way or another, these themes run through everything he has to say, I have since discovered. At an inner-city church in Washington, McGovern teaches a course he calls "The Morality of Whistleblowing."

Born in the Bronx in 1939 and educated at Fordham (and later Georgetown and Harvard), McGovern joined the Central Intelligence Agency during the Kennedy administration, when it was still possible to think sound, disinterested analysis out there in Langley, Virginia, could be a force for good. Long story short, as McGovern likes to say, he left 27 years later, by which time the scales had fallen, and founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence—Adams being a former colleague and one of the whistle-blowers who paid his price. Not long before that AR speech, McGovern went to Moscow to give the recently exiled Edward Snowden one of his Sam Adams Awards. This is the ex-spook's milieu: At 76, he dwells among the truth-tellers.

Israel has accused UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of promoting "terror" after he defended the Palestinian uprising as a natural response to the Tel Aviv regime's occupation of their lands. In a letter to Ban on Monday, Israel's Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon urged Ban to withdraw the comments he made in last month's address to the UN Security Council.

Ban had urged Israel to freeze the construction of settler units in the occupied territories, describing settlement expansion "an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community." Commenting on continued Palestinians protests, Ban had also said that "as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation."

In the letter, the Israeli official claimed that the UN chief's statements can put Israel and the rest of the world in jeopardy.The statement have created "two categories of terror: terror directed at Israelis and terror directed at the rest of the world," he wrote. Danon said the world body must punish the perpetrators of attacks against Israelis instead of criticizing the Tel Aviv regime for the ongoing unrest in the occupied Palestinian lands.

Ban's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UN chief will "stand by every word he has used." In an opinion piece published last week by The New York Times, Ban wrote, "The time has come for Israelis, Palestinians and the international community to read the writing on the wall: The status quo is untenable. Keeping another people under indefinite occupation undermines the security and the future of both Israelis and Palestinians," he said.