Moscow has denied Turkey’s accusation that a Russian Su-34 bomber violated its airspace on Friday. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that Ankara couldn’t have determined which country the jet belonged to under the circumstances they described. He stressed that the airspace controlling radar stations that Turkey has can only determine the altitude, flight line, and speed of an aerial vehi [...]

Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the European Commission, doesn`t see any link between mass sex assaults on New Year's Eve in Cologne and the ongoing refugee crisis, internal minutes has revealed. He also lamented the reintroduction of internal border checks within the Schengen zone. [...]

Robert Gates, a Republican stalwart and former US defence secretary who served under eight presidents, has derided the party’s election candidates for a grasp of national security issues that “would embarrass a middle schooler”. An ex-CIA director who first joined the White House under Richard Nixon, Gates joked that if frontrunner Donald Trump wins the presidency, he would emigrate to Ca [...]

Conservative activists have spent a generation building up their movement — and the Donald is ruining it all. If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has done for the leaders of the conservative movement, the Christian Right and the Republican party it’s that he’s teaching them a necessary lesson in reality: [...]

When a crackdown on excessive dispensing of prescription painkillers took place in the U.S., an unexpected consequence took root: a new epidemic of heroin use. Betty Tully has firsthand experience with the devastating effects of prescription opiate addiction. [...]

ANN JONES, went to Norway in 2011 as a Fulbright Fellow and recently returned to the U.S. Her books include, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — the Untold Story. She just wrote the piece “American Democracy Down for the Count: Or What Is It the Scandinavians Have That We Don’t?” [...]

The Wall Street Journal recently reported: “Both of the leading Democratic presidential candidates made the case [during the last debate] that the financial services industry wants to keep them out of the White House, fearing the tough regulatory measures they would impose if elected.” Vox reports: “According to [Bernie] Sanders, a bank that is too big to fail is too big to exist … [...]

See his pieces covering the situation in Oregon for The Raw Story, which reports: “Arun Gupta was on his way to cover the community meeting when he was told the road was closed due to a crash — and law enforcement officers told him alternate routes might take hours to reach the meeting in Grant County. Gupta soon learned rumors of what happened — here’s his account from Harney County:” [...]

AP is reporting: “Satellite photos obtained by The Associated Press confirm what church leaders and Middle East preservationists had feared: The oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been reduced to a field of rubble, yet another victim of the Islamic State group’s relentless destruction of heritage sites it considers heretical.” [...]

In order to justify regime change strategies in certain countries, official Washington demonizes their leaders, making them objects of revulsion and ridicule and thus influencing opinions of the American people, a game particularly dangerous when played against the leader of nuclear-armed Russia, according to an American psychology professor. [...]

A waitress at a bar in Austria, which controversially banned asylum seekers after some of them sexually harassed the female clients there, is pressing charges after migrants sexually assaulted her on New Year's Eve, she told Sputnik. Steffi G, a 19 year old waitress at Charly's Bar in the Austrian town of Bad Ischl, told Sputnik German that she is pressing charges after migrants sexually assaul [...]

After the 2014 coup ousting Ukraine’s elected President Yanukovych, the mainstream U.S. media hailed this unconstitutional move as a victory for “democracy” while ignoring the darker side, neo-Nazis coddled by the U.S. government since the Cold War, as Robert Parry wrote four days after the putsch. [...]

As public anger toward America’s self-interested establishment bubbles into a boil, the mainstream media has grown frantic appealing to the masses to “stay sane,” reject populism — especially Bernie Sanders’s variety — and renew the establishment’s lease on the White House, as Norman Solomon notes. For a long time, as he campaigned for President, a wide spectrum of establishment m [...]

Few Americans understand the ugly history behind the Nazi-affiliated movements that have gained substantial power in today’s U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime. Western propaganda has made these right-wing extremists the “good guys” versus the Russian “bad guys,” as Jonathan Marshall explains. The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, one of the leading journals in its field, offers a tw [...]

Former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton is the only candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination who supported the invasion of Iraq. That war not only resulted in 4,500 American soldiers being killed and thousands more permanently disabled, but also hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, the destabilization of the region with the rise of the Islamic State and other ex [...]

A newly obtained document and related emails released on Thursday show that while the residents of Flint, Michigan were slowly being poisoned by lead-contaminated water last year, the offices of state officials in the city were "quietly" outfitted with water coolers by Gov. Rick Snyder's administration. [...]

The Post, Owned by Man Worth $53.2 Billion, Really Doesn't Like Bernie Sanders. The Washington Post has been on something of an anti-Sanders kick lately. Its latest editorial, Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign, is somehow worse than its last one, [...]

With wall-to-wall crowds, climbing poll numbers, and a wave of critical new endorsements, less than one week before the primary contests officially commence, Bernie Sanders is riding high. Two new polls out on Wednesday show that the senator from Vermont is not only holding fast on his lead in Iowa, but also continues to gain against frontrunner Hillary Clinton nationally. [...]

Europe is on a dangerous, slippery slope of increasing xenophobia and racism engendered by the influx of refugees. Denmark’s new confiscation law is a sign of the brooding, baleful climate. But the real answer to the problem is dealing with Europe’s support for Washington’s criminal wars. [...]

Noam Chomsky, the noted radical and MIT professor emeritus, said the Republican Party has become so extreme in its rhetoric and policies that it poses a “serious danger to human survival.” “Today, the Republican Party has drifted off the rails,” Chomsky, a frequent critic of both parties, said in an interview Monday with The Huffington Post. [...]

After endangering -- and knowingly harming -- residents in Flint, Michigan, the government is reportedly threatening to take the children of those who opt not to pay to have the toxic water pumped into their homes. According to Michigan law, parents are considered to be neglectful if they do not have running water in their home, so if they do not pay for Flint’s poisonous water, they could be [...]

Police said 11,000 people have gathered in the Moldovan capital on Sunday for anti-government protests, disputing organizers' estimates of 100,000 demonstrators. CHISINAU (Sputnik) – Supporters of center-right and left-wing parties took to the streets to voice opposition to the appointment of a new prime minister and to call for snap elections. [...]