In January Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, congratulated the country on surviving its first winter without buying Russian gas. It had instead bought European gas which, as Poroshenko pointed out proudly, was 30% more expensive.

This sums up the core problem facing the Ukrainian economy. It is not corruption, a serious issue about which little can be done in the short term, but the ideologically driven choice to sever all ties with Russia, the country that has historically been its major trading partner and chief investor.

In little over a year, living standards in Ukraine have fallen by half, the value of the currency has slumped by more than two-thirds, and inflation has skyrocketed to 43%. Yet, even as the economy has collapsed, the government has insisted on economic policies that can only be termed suicidal.

Fleeing the ancient city of Palmyra, which they failed to obliterate but turned into a delayed-action minefield, the few surviving ISIS jihadists left behind a trace of bureaucratic paperwork documenting 10-months of a reign of terror , RT Arabic reports.

Following the May 2015 capture of ancient Palmyra, situated about 500 meters from the modern town known in Arabic as Tadmur, Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists imposed strict Sharia law to govern the daily lives of those residents who did not flee their rule.

A child has been killed or maimed every four hours in the year since Saudi-led airstrikes began in Yemen — a sevenfold increase over the previous year. Though this is likely a tragic underestimation of the true number, nearly one-third of all civilian casualties are children.

According to a report from UNICEF, the bombing campaign has taken an extraordinary toll on the civilian population in Yemen:

Attacks on schools and hospitals and the denial of humanitarian assistance to children continue to occur. The UN verified 51 attacks on education facilities, including schools and personnel.

Sixty-three health facilities were attacked, the U.N. verified, and basic "services and infrastructure in Yemen are on the verge of total collapse."

Even before the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed coalition began the now year-long offensive, Yemen had been one of the most impoverished countries in the world. But the intense fighting by all parties to the conflict has created a humanitarian crisis of alarming proportions — and children tend to be most affected.

"Children are not safe anywhere in Yemen. Even playing or sleeping has become dangerous," Julien Harneis, UNICEF representative in Yemen, told AFP in an email.

It's been over a year since Hillary Clinton's "EmailGate" scandal began, and the presidential candidate has yet to be charged with a crime.

In January, it was reported that many of the emails on Clinton's private home email server were top secret, and that some are "too damaging" to national security to be released under any circumstances.

About a month ago, the Justice Department granted immunity to Bryan Pagliano, a former State Department staffer who set up Hillary's private email server in 2009. After he set it up, Hillary then paid him personally to maintain it for her.

Pagliano had previously invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before a Congressional committee last fall; now he has immunity and will testify.

The security detail for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan clashed with opposing activists for the second day in a row in Washington, DC, removing journalists and even confronting city police after law enforcement refused to remove protesters from the area. With Erdogan set to give a speech at the Brookings Institute on Thursday, a group of protesters opposing his crackdown on free speech in Turkey, his government's treatment of the country's Kurdish population, and what they say is his tolerance of Islamic State, gathered near the DC-based think tank to express their opposition.

The scene quickly devolved into chaos as demonstrators tried to get closer to Brookings, with journalists tweeting that Erdogan's security scuffled with protesters. Erdogan's security detail became physical with reporters, removing one journalist from Brookings, kicking another, and throwing a female reporter to the sidewalk, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Turkish bodyguards also told a cameraman that he is not allowed to film outside of the building. Another was chased across the street, while Foreign Policy said its reporters were scolded by security. In another case, Erdogan's security reportedly called one female journalist "a PKK whore" for standing near the Brookings building.

Saudi Arabia announced that it is building a drone plant in cooperation with South Africa, but a well-known Saudi defense analyst claimed this is a guise to hide the clandestine purchases of aircraft from Israel.

The analyst, who calls himself "Mujtahid" has been leaking exclusive information about the royal family of Saudi Arabia on Twitter since the early 2000s. He challenged the official report released by the Saudi Defense Ministry this week, which stated the kingdom would build a drone factory in collaboration with South Africa. "The report aims to hide the fact that Saudi Arabia intends to purchase drones from Israel via South Africa," he said.

"Saudi Arabia buys Israeli drones through South Africa. These drones later arrive from South Africa, dismantled, to Saudi Arabia, where they are assembled," Mujtahid added, describing the mechanism developed to carry out the Israeli-Saudi deal. He went on to accuse Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is Saudi Defense Minister and, according to some experts, the country's second most powerful person, of serving Israel's interest by purchasing drones from the Jewish state.

Saudi Arabia has been trying for years to strengthen its armed forces with drone capabilities. In 2010, General Atomics, the US producer of the Predator drone family, announced it had acquired export licenses for a number of Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia. Export to Saudi Arabia has so far failed to materialize, even though a similar deal with the United Arab Emirates was approved by the US Congress in 2015.

For many more years than any intelligent person would want to count, Israel was the sacred cow of the United States. From its violent, bloody, genocidal inception that involved the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians, and the murder of another 10,000, right through to the illegal, immoral occupation of the West Bank and blockade (aka occupation) of the Gaza Strip, Israel, in the view of U.S. governance and politics, could do no wrong. Anyone who dared to criticize Israel's many crimes was accused of anti-Semitism; as Dr. Norman Finkelstein said, "whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle, its apologists sound the alarm that a 'new anti-Semitism' is upon us". In the past, if a Jew, such as Dr. Finkelstein, was critical of Israel, Zionists raised the cry that he was 'a self-hating Jew', and U.S. politicians bought that ridiculous line. As a result, Israel became the beneficiary of the bulk of U.S. foreign aid, and has relied on the U.S. for years for protection from international accountability for its crimes, with the U.S always happy to veto any United Nations resolution condemning Israeli violations of human rights and international law.

Oh, but what a difference a 51-day, genocidal onslaught can make! This, of course, refers to the invasion and carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014. Israel had previously been able to 'mow the grass', as it refers to these periodic bombing episodes, with complete impunity. But thanks largely to social media, the world stopped believing that vulnerable, little Israel, with the fourth largest military in the world, and supplied and backed by the largest, was in grave danger from Big Bad Palestine, a nation it illegally occupies, and which has no army, navy or air force. Ongoing settlement activity by apartheid Israel, along with Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu's declaration that Palestinians would never have an independent state while he is prime murderer, and a conflicted relationship with his favorite check-writer, President Barack Obama, seem to have soured the whole thing for Israel.

Moscow has submitted data on Turkey's illegal arms and military hardware supply to Islamic State in Syria to the UN Security Council. Supplies are supervised by the Turkish intelligence service, Russian UN envoy Vitaly Churkin said as cited by Russian media. The main supplier of arms and military equipment to Islamic State (IS, Daesh, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants is Turkey, which uses non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for this purpose. The National Intelligence Organization of Turkey is in charge of the operations. Transportation is carried out mainly via automobiles, including humanitarian aid convoys, Churkin wrote in a letter to the UN Security Council (UNSC).

Terrorist groups operating in Syria received explosive materials worth $ 1.9 million via Turkey last year, according to the letter.

In total, the terrorists were delivered 2.5 thousand tons of ammonium nitrate (worth around $788,700), 456 tons of potassium nitrate ($468,700), 75 tons of aluminum powder ($496,500), sodium nitrate ($19,400), glycerin ($102,500) and nitric acid ($34,000 thousand) via Turkey in 2015, Churkin wrote.

By his military withdrawal, Putin was actually enhancing his leverage over both the military situation and the political negotiations still to come

When Russian President Vladimir Putin had a substantive meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry last week, it was an extremely rare departure from normal protocol. There was some political logic to the meeting, however, because Putin and Kerry have clearly been the primary drivers of their respective governments' policies toward Syria, and their negotiations have already led to a stunningly successful Syrian ceasefire and possible Syrian negotiations on a political settlement.

Washington and Moscow had to cooperate in order to get that ceasefire along with the jump-starting of intra-Syrian negotiations, now scheduled to begin next month, according to UN special envoy Steffan de Mistura. But the diplomatic maneuvering did not involve equal influence on each other's policies. Putin's Russia has now demonstrated that it has effective leverage over the policy of Kerry and the United States in Syria, whereas Kerry has no similar leverage over Russian policy.

Finland Defense Minister Jussi Niinisto said Russia doesn't pose a threat to his country.

Niinisto said that while his country is well aware of Russia developing its military potential and conducting numerous snap military exercises, Helsinki doesn't consider it a threat.

"Finland does not perceive any direct military threat coming from Russia," Niinistö said during an interview with the online newspaper Lenta.ru.

The minister also said that due to the fact that the ongoing crisis in Ukraine may in fact become permanent, he believes that Finland should maintain its contacts with Russia.