What was supposed to happen in Ukraine? Why has the Western media stopped talking about the blunders of the Ukrainian regime? Is Ukraine a failed state beyond repair? How long will Petro Poroshenko last as president of Ukraine? RT's CrossTalk brings together Eric Kraus, Charles Bausman, and Alexander Mercouris to discuss the elephant in Europe's living room.

Hosted by a popular TV and radio journalist, the following Russian chat show ('Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev') provides insight into how Russians view the U.S. sanctions and the broader economic and propaganda war directed against their country.

Guests

Sergei Markov: Deputy Chairman of the Russian Public Forum on International Affairs
Andrei Isaev: Chairman of the Committee of the State Duma of the Russian Federation on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans' Affairs
Sergei Mikheev: Political Scientist
Nikolai Starikov: Writer and co-Chairman of the Great Fatherland Party
Evgeny Tarlo: Member of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation

Original source

Turn on Subtitles/CC for EN subtitles

Dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards collected millions of dollars in U.S. Social Security benefits after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The payments, underwritten by American taxpayers, flowed through a legal loophole that gave the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave the U.S. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal U.S. government records.

Among those receiving benefits were armed SS troops who guarded the network of Nazi camps where millions of Jews perished; a rocket scientist who used slave laborers to advance his research in the Third Reich; and a Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland.

There are at least four living beneficiaries. They include Martin Hartmann, a former SS guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany, and Jakob Denzinger, who patrolled the grounds at the Auschwitz camp complex in Poland.

Hartmann moved to Berlin in 2007 from Arizona just before being stripped of his U.S. citizenship. Denzinger fled to Germany from Ohio in 1989 after learning denaturalization proceedings against him were underway.

He soon resettled in Croatia and now lives in a spacious apartment on the right bank of the Drava River in Osijek. Denzinger would not discuss his situation when questioned by an AP reporter; Denzinger's son, who lives in the U.S., confirmed his father receives Social Security payments and said he deserved them.

Eight Afghan paramilitary soldiers were killed during an assault on a Taliban hide-out in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. It was the latest of several clashes to take a heavy toll on the security forces as American combat forces leave the country.

The deaths, caused by a car bomb, occurred during a raid by the Khost Protection Force, a C.I.A.-trained paramilitary unit that has carried out operations along the border with Pakistan for more than a decade.

Fighters with the force, who operate in Khost Province, swooped on a remote compound believed to house suicide bombers, killing three people including one woman, the Khost governor's office said in a statement. But once they had secured the compound, a car bomb exploded, killing eight of the militiamen and wounding five.

The governor's spokesman, Mohammad Mubarez Zadran, confirmed in a phone interview that the troops belonged to the Khost militia force, established by the C.I.A. and American Special Operations forces after 2001, and which The Associated Press reported in May had up to 3,500 fighters.

The future of the Khost Protection Force, and others like it in various Afghan provinces, has been unclear as the C.I.A. withdraws from remote Afghan bases in concert with the broader drawdown of American combat troops from Afghanistan. Some of the units were earmarked to be handed over to the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, after this year.

A Lebanese-American reporter working for Iranian channel, Press TV, Serena Shim has been killed in a car crash in Turkey, following her reports of accusations from Turkey's intelligence agency that she had been "spying."

"Our correspondent Serena Shim has been killed near the Turkey-Syria border. Serena was killed in a reported car accident when she was returning from a report scene...their car collided with a heavy vehicle," a Press TV broadcast stated on Monday. Shim had also been the mother of two young children.

The driver of the vehicle was subsequently arrested, according to Turkish news agency Hurriyet, citing the Turkish Doğan News Agency. Press TV disputed this, alleging that both driver and vehicle have disappeared.

Press TV has additionally expressed suspicion, implying that it may not have been an accident. "Just a couple of days ago she had been threatened by Turkish intelligence," the broadcast said.

Shim had been returning to her hotel after reporting from Suruç - a rural district near the Syrian border, where a many foreign journalists are based. They are covering news from the Syrian northeastern border town of Kobani, under siege by Islamic State militants for the past month due to its strategic importance.

The Swedish military did not confirm allegations that "a damaged Russian submarine" is being hunted for in waters east of Stockholm, while adding that a search for a "foreign vessel" is ongoing. Moscow said none of its military vessels have been damaged.

Sweden deploys troops near Stockholm due to alleged underwater threat

The official statement by the Swedish military said the search around the Stockholm archipelago was due to "alien underwater activity."

However, Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet cited "several persons with knowledge about the ongoing search operation" to say that the operation was launched after a radio communication in Russian was detected in the area. The communication was reportedly transmitted on a special frequency, used by Russia in emergency situations.

The pine trees in Palestine appeared with the establishment of the state of Israel. The pine is generally a European species which before the 20th century was not to be seen in the Middle East. It was brought to Palestine by the Zionist settlers for two main reasons. Firstly, it gave the new Jewish settlers the feeling that the place they had migrated to is somehow part of Europe. And if Palestine were to be 'Europeanized' in such a manner it would also be 'civilized' and the inferior local population would be replaced by a superior one. Thus Zionism was not just a redemption of an ancient land, it was also the revitalization of what in their eyes was an Arabian desert both ecologically and culturally.The second reason for their import was more practical; they were brought to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that took place in 1947-48 and produced the Palestinian Catastrophe, the Nakba. The fast-growing pine was widely used to create Israeli national and recreational parks to hide the ruins of the destroyed Palestinian villages and neighborhoods evicted by force in 1948.

These forests were presented later on as Israel's green lungs forming together an ecological carpet covering a barren land. The largest of these 'lungs' is the Mount Carmel National Park near Haifa; one of the early projects which attempted to erase the Palestinian life and society that existed there for centuries. This forest stretches over big and famous villages such as Ijzim, Umm al-Zinat and Khubbaza which have disappeared and are no longer to be found on any map.

This method did not stop in 1948. When Israel occupied the West Bank and Jerusalem in 1967 pine trees again were planted to cover the new wave of destroyed villages those Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba, in the Latrun Valley near Jerusalem. In their stead the 'green lung', the Canada Park appeared as a recreational ground hiding the inhumanity of the villages' depopulation.

Covering ethnic cleansing with pine trees is probably the most cynical method employed by Israel in its quest to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. Like all the other means, which will be described here, they can be found in every historical juncture ever since Zionism appeared on the land of Palestine.

Another means used in 1948 and in 1967 was renaming Palestinian villages as Jewish settlement - more often than not by appropriating the Arabic name of the destroyed Palestine community for the new settlement. A naming committee in 1949 transformed in such a way the destroyed villages of 1948 and Hebrewized the Arabic names and thus the Palestinian village of Lubya became Kibbutz Lavi and the Palestinian city of Asqalan became the Israeli city of Ashkelon. And after the 1967 occupation, the settlement of Tekoa was built next to the West Bank village of Tuqu' and on its land.

The principal means however were not trees or renaming - it was, and still is, colonization. For this method to succeed this 19th century method, deemed illegal already hundred years ago, had first to be accepted and approved by the Israeli Jewish society; even in 2014.

Former Treasury Secretary Dr. Paul Craig Roberts says all U.S. financial policy revolves around propping up the dollar. Dr. Roberts contends, "I've always said the whole system is rigged. It's a house of cards, and the weak spot is the dollar because they cannot print foreign currencies for which to buy dollars. So, if there is a worldwide run on the dollar, they lose control then. In the meantime, they have all these things they can do to counteract the direction of the markets, and I expect them to continue doing that."

So, if propping up the dollar is the top priority, then suppressing the gold price is a close second. Could the COMEX or LBMA simply run out of metal sold below mining cost? Dr. Roberts says,

"Well, a lot of people think that, particularly people who think there is no gold left in Fort Knox or in the New York Fed. They think all that has been lent out and used up. If they're right, then the policy they have in naked shorts in gold to drive down the price just increases the demand in Asia for more bullion. If that is true and they don't have a way to make those deliveries, then they are producing the crisis for themselves by holding down the gold price. Whereas, if they let the price rise, it might temper the demand for gold in Asia and remove that problem."

For months, the New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets have insisted that it's just Russian propaganda to say that a significant neo-Nazi presence exists inside Ukraine, but thousands of these "non-existent" neo-Nazis battled police on Tuesday outside the parliament building in Kiev demanding recognition of their Hitler-collaborating forebears.

The parliament, aware of the obvious public relations fiasco that would follow if it bowed to far-right demands to honor members of the Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UIA), defeated the proposal. That touched off riots by an estimated 8,000 protesters led by Ukraine's right-wing Svoboda party and the Right Sektor.

Historians blame the UIA and other Ukrainian fascist forces for the extermination of thousands of Poles and Jews during World War II as these right-wing Ukrainian paramilitaries sided with the German Nazis in their fight against the Soviet Union's Red Army. Svoboda and the Right Sektor have elevated UIA leader Stepan Bandera to the level of a Ukrainian national hero.

But Svoboda and Right Sektor activists are not just neo-Nazi street protesters. They were key figures in last February's violent uprising that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych and established a coup regime that the U.S. State Department quickly recognized as "legitimate." Many far-right militants have since been incorporated into the Ukrainian military in its fight to crush resistance to the coup regime from ethnic Russians in Ukraine's east.

President Barack Obama made a rare appearance on the campaign trail on Sunday with a rally to support the Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland, though the event was marred somewhat by early departures of crowd members and a yelling heckler.

With approval levels hovering around record lows, Obama has spent most of his campaign-related efforts this year raising money for struggling Democrats, who risk losing control of the U.S. Senate in the Nov. 4 midterm election.

Many candidates from his party have been wary of appearing with him during their election races because of his sagging popularity.

Not so Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown of Maryland, who is running for governor, and Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois, who is running for re-election.

"You've got to vote," Obama repeated over and over at a rally for Brown in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, near Washington.

Democrats have a history of not turning up to vote in midterm elections.

"There are no excuses. The future is up to us," Obama said.

Some 8,000 people turned out for the event, held in a noisy school gymnasium. But a steady stream of people walked out while he spoke, and a heckler interrupted his remarks.
Obama's help, or lack thereof, may not matter much to Brown, who is 11 points ahead of Republican opponent Larry Hogan, according to an average of polls by RealClearPolitics.

Quinn's race is tighter. He is ahead of Republican Bruce Rauner by 1.8 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average.

The governor, echoing the president at other Democratic events, encouraged the crowd at Chicago State University to get to the polls.

"When we vote, we win," Quinn told the auditorium of some 6,200 people.

Obama picked out people from the crowd whom he knew, and seemed to relish being back in Illinois.

"It's good to be home," Obama said. "I care about what happens here," he said to applause.

Obama said he planned to cast his vote early on Monday. He is scheduled to spend the night at his Chicago home.