Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday congratulated the military for downing a Syrian warplane near its border and warned of a "heavy" response if its airspace was violated.

"Our response from now will be heavy if you violate our airspace," Erdogan said during an election rally, referring to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

"I congratulate the chief of general staff, the armed forces and those honourable pilots... I congratulate our air forces," said the premier.

Syria on Sunday accused its northern neighbour of "flagrant aggression" after Turkish forces shot down the warplane as it bombarded rebels near the border.

Turkish media reported that the army warned two Syrian jets approaching the border to turn away, but scrambled its F-16 jets when one refused to abide by the warning.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the plane was striking the northern province of Latakia when it was hit, catching fire and crashing in Syrian territory.

Turkish warplanes last year downed a Syrian helicopter, which Ankara said was detected two kilometres inside Turkish airspace.

Turkey toughened its rules of engagement after the downing of one of its fighter jets by the Syrian air force in June 2012, to say that any military approach of the Turkish border from Syria would be considered a threat.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday his country's armed forces had shot down a Syrian jet after it violated Turkish airspace, confirming media reports.

"A Syrian plane violated our airspace. Our F-16s took off and hit this plane. Why? because if you violate my airspace, our slap after this will be hard," he told a rally of his supporters in northwest Turkey ahead of March 30 local elections.

The drug haul was unremarkable, but the destination raised eyebrows.

German weekly, Bild am Sonntag, reported Sunday that customs officials intercepted a cocaine shipment destined for the Vatican in January.

Officers at Leipzig airport found 12 ounces of the drug packed into 14 condoms inside a shipment of cushions coming from South America.

The paper says the package was simply addressed to the Vatican postal office, meaning any of the Catholic mini-state's 800 residents could have picked it up.

Citing a German customs report, the paper adds that a sting operation arranged with Vatican police didn't lure a possible recipient. The drugs would have a street value of several tens of thousands of euros (dollars).

Neither German customs nor the Vatican could be immediately reached for comment.

The UN Special Rapporteur on occupied Palestine accused Israeli authorities of conducting colonialist policies that constitute forms of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Speaking at a news conference at the UN European headquarters in Geneva on Friday, the UN Special Rapporteur on occupied Palestine, Richard Falk, accused Israel of pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and creating unbearable conditions for the minority to force them to immigrate.

Falk, an ethnic Jewish expert in international law and professor emeritus at Princeton University, told journalists that Israeli policies have "unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing."

In the present situation where talks between Israel and Palestinian authority remain in deadlock, the acceleration of Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territories is causing Palestinians to lose their faith that a state of their own could ever be created.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has "lost Ukraine for good" with his move to annex Crimea, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko said Friday in her first live television appearance since returning to the country.

Tymoshenko, who spent three years in jail on what she said were politically motivated charges before being freed last month, appealed to fellow Ukrainians to be ready to fight in the event of a Russian invasion.

"Putin has lost Ukraine forever after declaring war on us," said the leader of the 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution as she appeared on a live talk show in her trademark blonde plaits.

When it gets complicated and confusing, when you're overwhelmed with too much information, changing daily; too many explanations, some contradictory ... try putting it into some kind of context by stepping back and looking at the larger, long-term picture.

The United States strives for world domination, hegemony wherever possible, their main occupation for over a century, it's what they do for a living. The United States, NATO and the European Union form The Holy Triumvirate. The Holy Triumvirate has subsidiaries, chiefly The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Criminal Court ... all help to keep in line those governments lacking the Holy Triumvirate Seal Of Approval: the IMF, WB, and WTO impose market fundamentalism, while foreign leaders who act too independent are threatened with being handed over to the ICC for heavy punishment, as the United States imposes sanctions on governments and their leaders as only the King of Sanctions can, lacking any sense of hypocrisy or irony.

And who threatens United States domination? Who can challenge The Holy Triumvirate's hegemony? Only Russia and China, if they were as imperialistic as the Western powers. (No, the Soviet Union wasn't imperialistic; that was self-defense; Eastern Europe was a highway twice used by the West to invade; tens of millions of Russians killed or wounded.)

Three Democratic lawmakers asked to discuss with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder the Department of Justice's allegedly uneven efforts to prosecute mortgage fraud, according to a letter dated Monday.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and representatives Elijah Cummings and Maxine Waters are seeking an audience with Holder over a new watchdog report that said the FBI ranked mortgage fraud as a low threat after the height of the financial crisis, even though the Justice Department had said investigating that crime would be a top priority.

"This report calls into question the Department's commitment to investigate and prosecute crimes such as predatory lending, loan modification scams, and abusive mortgage servicing practices," the three lawmakers wrote of the report released last week by the Justice Department's inspector general.

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Washington is making hay of its defeat in Ukraine: it is getting the Europeans to cut themselves off economically from Russia and is already imposing on them the expansion of its missile coverage. While the Western media focus on NATO's narrative of events (the so-called "military annexation" of Crimea), the Alliance is noiselessly deploying its imperial apparatus.

Vice President Joe Biden's flash visit to Poland and Estonia to ensure that, in the face of "Russia's shameless incursion" in Ukraine - a country determined to build "a government for the people" (guaranteed by the neo-Nazis [1] brought to power by the "new Gladio" coup [2] ) - the United States reiterates its unwavering commitment to comply with Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty on "collective defense." As Ukraine is now a de facto, but not official, member of NATO, there is always "non-Article 5," urging members to "execute evolving missions not described under Article 5," which was promoted by the Italian government of Massimo D'Alema during the NATO war on Yugoslavia in 1999, and later also applied to the wars on Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

The European Union and the United States, which have supported and funded for years all neo-Nazi groups and other radical extremist factions in Eastern Europe, have given the order to these new fascists never use to brandish the swastika, associated with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, in their marches or other demonstrations.

Indeed, it would be a more discreet way to be seen in public, but an even better way to avoid compromising the U.S. and the European Union because of the secret alliance that binds them to these groups (intelligence operatives and subversive infiltration within the New Gladio).

Thus, the Western mainstream press can present them today as fighters for democracy in the face of the "Russian invasion". However their methods, ideology and actions are a continuation of the same Nazi practices that took place in 1933-1939.

In Kiev, the police arrived at the City Hall after receiving word that unidentified persons had broken into the municipal offices. But they were caught in an ambush by dozens of masked men protected by helmets, who started beating them up.

Ukraine has become the final battlefield in the "cold war", and it is becoming a possibility that the crisis will trigger a second "cold war". The Crimean parliament's declaration of independence from Ukraine ahead of the March 16 referendum indicates that Crimea may go ahead and join Russia. The tug of war between Russia and western countries teaches us four things.

A geostrategic conflict leads to the tragedy of big-power politics

Most people in west Ukraine are Catholics while in east Ukraine most are Russian Orthodox believers. The financial crisis caused conflict between civilizations, pushing Ukraine to the brink of bankruptcy and fragmentation. This created a vacuum that provided the big powers wth an incentive to meddle in Ukraine's affairs.

Ukraine's economic over-reliance on Russia is the soft underbelly of its national security

In recent years, the western countries have succeeded in promoting several regime changes. Ukraine is on the brink of debt default and bankruptcy. Ukraine's economic over-reliance on Russia is the soft underbelly of its national security. Western countries have taken advantage of this weak spot in their efforts to promote regime change in Ukraine.

The MasterCard and Visa electronic payment networks have reversed their decision to cut off online services for payment transactions for the clients of the SMP bank controlled by brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who have both been listed among the Russian officials subject to US sanctions over Crimea.

SMP Bank's co-owner Yuri Kovalchuk is also on the US sanctions list of 20 Russians, which was announced on Thursday.

The same day Visa and MasterCard stopped serving the clients of SPM Bank and another Russian bank, Rossiya. The payment system MasterCard made this decision in the late hours of Saturday and the Visa system made the decision on Sunday morning.

"By now, card serviceability for the bank's MasterCard holders has been fully restored. Transactions for Visa card holders will resume within hours," SPN Bank said in statement on Sunday.

"We are glad that the world's largest international payment networks have heeded our arguments and reversed their decision to suspend transactions...," the statement quotes the bank's CEO Dmitry Kalantyrsky as saying.