Air routes in the eastern Ukraine were shut down yesterday after the shock destruction of ­Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 from a missile attack, but questions remain about whether authorities should have closed the route sooner.

Europe's Eurocontrol said Ukrainian authorities had informed it that routes through Dnipropetrovsk Flight Information Region (FIR) were closed until further notice and flight plans filed for the routes were now being ­rejected.

The influential Flight Safety Foundation has already called for an immediate independent international investigation into the ­incident and there are calls for a new body to better estimate the risk posed by global trouble spots.

University of Central Queensland aviation specialist Ron Bishop, who spent 23 years with US Air Force special operations, said a better notification system for global hotspots was needed.

Washington's propaganda machine is in such high gear that we are in danger of losing the facts that we do have.

One fact is that the separatists do not have the expensive Buk anti-aircraft missile system or the trained personnel to operate it.

Another fact is that the separatists have no incentive to shoot down an airliner and neither does Russia. Anyone can tell the difference between low-flying attack aircraft and an airliner at 33,000 feet.

The Ukrainians do have Buk anti-aircraft missile systems, and a Buk battery was operational in the region and deployed at a site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner.

Just as the separatists and the Russian government have no incentive to shoot down an airliner, neither does the Ukrainian government nor, one would think, even the crazed extreme Ukrainian nationalists who have formed militias to take the fight against the separatists that the Ukrainian army is not keen to undertake - unless there was a plan to frame Russia.

The level of unsubstantiated propaganda being directed against Russia regarding the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 has reached unprecedented lows.

There is tangible desperation across Western media establishments, their political spheres, and within their corporate-financier funded policy think-tanks as they attempt to reassert their agenda and narrative not only upon the crisis in Ukraine, but upon the entire world as their weakening grip becomes apparent to all.

The dangerous desperation emanating from the West follows the latest in a series of growing failures - the previous and most comparable being the loss of its proxy war against Syria and the desperate criminal conspiracy they unleashed in a failed attempt to save it.

Israeli forces sprayed homes and shops along Bethlehem's Manger Street with a foul-smelling chemical on Friday night following clashes with local youths protesting in solidarity with Gaza.

On Friday evening, Israeli forces opened fire on youths in northern Bethlehem with stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets after large marches broke out in the area near Rachel's Tomb.

After midnight, Israeli forces brought in trucks that sprayed the sides of buildings along Manger Street with a putrid-smelling chemical known as "Skunk."

The chemical was sprayed along Bethlehem's main street primarily in the areas in front of the Paradise Hotel and Azza refugee camp, and as of morning the area continued to smell of sewage.

Matthew Bennett, editor of The Spain Report, has debunked one of yesterday's many disinformation campaigns. Yesterday, a man who identified himself as "Carlos,"supposedly a Spanish air traffic controller working in Kiev, made many fantastical claims on Twitter about yesterday's events. According to Carlos, two Ukrainian jets shot down the airliner, and soldiers were raiding his traffic control tower in Kiev as the story was unfolding.

Bennett has received confirmation from the Spanish embassy that "Carlos," a man who made similar claims during the Maidan protests, does not exist. Bennett tells us that, "he was posting yesterday that he was a Spanish controller in a tower that was taken over by soldiers as events unfolded. As far as I know, he was the source of the 'MH 17 tailed by two Ukrainian fighters' story. He's been quoted quite a bit on RT [the Russian state-operated propaganda network] since yesterday, and gained several thousand new Twitter followers in just a few hours."

"They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind as it is very proper for those who tackle the darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much..."

- Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness"

July 18, 2014 "ICH" - A noticeable change has occurred in Israel since its bombardment of Gaza in 2008/9, what I have termed the Christmas bombing of imprisoned civilians caught in a steel net surrounding their sliver of land, a change that offers perspective on the altering mindset that guides this benumbed state. Then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Saturday the 27^th "...instructed the Foreign ministry to take emergency measures to adapt Israel's international public relations to the ongoing escalation in the Gaza strip" (Haaretz, 12/28/08). Her intent as she ordered the military to continue its devastation of the Gazan people resulting in over 1400 dead, many children, was "to explain the rationale for the expanded IDF operations in the Gaza strip." An all out call to PR personnel to mobilize was issued, including those with language proficiency in Arabic, Italian, Spanish and German, the better to muffle the voices of those finding fault with the invasion. She noted at the time that Israel expects foreign media and diplomatic figures to support Israel.

Washington - US President Barack Obama telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday to voice concerns about the crisis in Gaza amid an Israeli ground offensive.

Obama said that while the US supports Israel's right to defend itself, "the United States and our friends and allies are deeply concerned about the risks of further escalation and the loss of more innocent life."

Israeli troops launched an offensive on the Gaza periphery aimed at destroying Hamas's network of cross-border tunnels on the 11th day of an assault in which 274 Palestinians, including many children, have been killed.

"Although we support military efforts by the Israelis to make sure that rockets are not being fired into their territory, we also have said that our understanding is the current military ground operations are designed to deal with the tunnels," Obama told reporters.

The US commander-in-chief added that Washington was "hopeful that Israel will continue to approach this process in a way that minimizes civilian casualties."

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Israel of "barbarism that surpasses Hitler" during its ground invasion of Gaza.

Erdogan made the comment during a campaign speech Saturday in the Black Sea port city of Ordu. He is running for the presidency in elections next month.

He has been speaking out strongly against Israel during its offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza, which has killed more than 300 Palestinians. He accuses Israel of using disproportionate force and has said the operation there has derailed efforts to normalize Turkish-Israeli ties. Those soured after Israel's 2010 raid on an aid ship which killed eight Turks and a Turkish-American.

Hundreds have also staged protests in recent days outside Israeli diplomatic mission in Ankara and Istanbul.

Edward Bernays was the master of influencing and shaping public opinion who developed upon the ideas of earlier social psychologists and the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, in order to create techniques to manipulate the subconscious desires of the masses.

Throughout his 103-year lifespan, the "father of public relations" was at the pinnacle of his field advising US Presidents Coolidge, Eisenhower, Hoover and Wilson, as well as inventor Thomas Edison, US industrialist Henry Ford and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. He also reportedly refused invitations by Hitler and Franco to work on fascist propaganda campaigns in Europe.

At the end of World War 1 Bernays served as a propagandist for America before going on to work with various government departments and corporations throughout his lifetime, including: the US Department of State, CBS, Procter and Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company, as well as designing the propaganda campaign for the United Fruit Company which led to the CIA coup against the Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.

Passenger Boeing 777 2H6ER of Malaysia Airlines crashed in Ukraine near the village Grabovo 50 kilometers from the Russian border. All 283 passengers and 15 crew members were killed in the plane crash. Shortly after becoming aware of the accident, many sources suggested that B777 was hit by anti-aircraft missile system. Media also quoted eyewitnesses who said that Malaysian plane was shot down from the board of Su-25 by the Ukrainian Air Force.

The flight

Malaysian passenger plane, registration number 9M-MRD, KLM flight KL4103, took off from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur at 02.14 pm Moscow time on July 17, 2014. At about 04:20 pm Moscow time, when the plane was already over the territory of Ukraine, the contact was lost with it. It is known that, approximately 50 kilometers away from the Russian border, the liner began to descend, but whether it was the cause of damage to the aircraft or change of scheduled tier before moving from one country's airspace to another, is not yet clear. Later, B777's wreckage and bodies of passengers have been found near the village of Grabovo in the Donetsk region.

According to the State Air Traffic Service Enterprise of Ukraine (the "UkSATSE") responsible for the maintenance of passenger vessels in Ukrainian airspace, the flight of Malaysian Boeing was performed in accordance with the flight rules, without any technical faults. According to the UkSATSE CEO Dmitry Babeychuk, pilots of the KLM flight KL4103 did not report any problems. The last maintenance of the liner was held on July 11, 2014. The plane was flying at an altitude of 10.6 thousand meters, which is 2.7 thousand meters higher than the height of the official curfew imposed by the Ukrainian authorities on July 8 this year.