ROSTILAV ISHCHENKO—Now Poroshenko again leads an already fatally exhausted and extremely worn-out Ukrainian state towards anti-constitutional methods of solving the question of power. At the same time, people hate him, and those who will succeed him are loved not much more. Only the formal legitimacy of power that is expressed in its international recognition still keeps Ukraine united. The competing oligarchical groups still hope that the international community will somehow stabilise the internal political situation for them, and that they will be able to remain engaged in their favourite thing – plundering the people and the country. All this shaky design starts instantly collapsing as soon as the legal framework is in the rear view mirror.
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MS Estonia – still doubts over official story 24 years after the biggest maritime disaster in Europe since WW2
TERJE MALOY—Later, it became known that MS Estonia had been used for sensitive military transports, in fact only weeks before the incident. A whistleblower working in the Swedish customs later testified that several trucks were let through with no questions asked, on MS Estonia’s journeys the 14th and 20th of September, just one and two weeks before the incident. People who might have had something to say, died. A former Estonian customs official, Igor Kristopovitsch, who now ran company dealing with sensitive transports, including on the MS Estonia, was shot on the October 22nd, four weeks after incident.
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US Fake World War 2 History Underlies Permanent Bipartisan Hostility Toward Russia
BRUCE DIXON—Briefly, we’re taught that Nazi Germany was just plain inexplicable evil, that this Hitler dude came to power with his Nazi party, they persecuted Jews, gypsies and dissidents, they conquered France and they menaced England but were stopped short when they lost the battle of Britain in the air. Eventually the US joined the war, invading North Africa, defeating the Nazis there, going on to fight the Germans in Italy, and eventually staging the D-Day invasion of France. They marched into Germany to finally defeat the Nazis and hanged a number of Nazi officials for war crimes and genocide at Nuremberg. The Russians, the Soviet Union at the time, we were taught, were sort of in the war too as allies but soon after the defeat of the Nazis they became enemies, and have been that ever since. Nearly all of that is horseshit.
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KULTURALIA: Putting the Red in Redcoats
MARY M THEOBALD—Finding cochineal would have been easier if the English had known what it was. To the naked eye, the dried bits of cochineal look like tiny peppercorns. Some said cochineal was a seed; others said it was an insect or dried worm. Some had it both ways, calling it “wormberry.” In an age when rotten meat was believed to spawn maggots and clams were thought to grow out of sand, spontaneous generation was a reasonable explanation for any mysterious form of life. Cochineal, some said, was a cactus berry that turned into a red worm.
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