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Reader Comments - NAACP Bombing; Ferguson Grand Jury; Charlie Hebdo and the Religious Right; Ukraine, Russia and Nazi Revival; TPP Power Grab; 2014 Worker Victories; NYPD Insubordination = Drop in Crime; Thomas Piketty; Selma,Martin Luther King, LBJ and Reality; Gap Between Productivity and Pay; BDS, Palestine and Israel; Cheap Gas; Announcements - Cuba Five Book Signing; New Resource - Greece, Golden Dawn and Fascism

The weakness of the petrostate economy could jolt Russia's political elites-or its ordinary citizens-to take action.

Rep. John Conyers wanted to block U.S. funding to neo-Nazis in Ukraine. But the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center refused to help.

BRICS and the SCO are the two largest independent international organizations to develop over the past decade. What role these new organizations will play internationally is not clear. Certainly sanction regimens will be harder to maintain because the SCO and the BRICS create alternatives. South Africa, for instance, announced that it would begin buying Iran oil in the next few months, an important breach in the sanctions against Iran.

In Germany heads fall - Lenin's head still needs to be kept buried, and Berlin's once-popular gay mayor bows out. Another head featured in the press belongs to a man who is certainly not gay nor a Lenin. Sadly, current references to Vladimir Putin, evoke all too sharply recollections of German language used against every Russian leader since the start of World War I a hundred years ago.

The crisis shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

Reader Comments - "I Question America" -- Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer; The Coming Race War Won't Be About Race; Ferguson - Politicians and AFL-CIO - Both Missing; Israelis in US: An Open Letter to American Jews on Gaza; Minnesota Home Health Care Workers Unionize; Ukraine and Neo-Nazis; Sanctions & the Dollar; Economic Democracy Project's first event: Economic Democracy And The Struggle For Black Independence - Sept. 3 - New York

Kiev throws paramilitaries - some openly neo-Nazi - into the front of the battle with rebels. Whether it is hero-worship of Hungary's Miklós Horthy, leaders of Croatia's Hitlerist Ustasha, the Nazis' Waffen SS divisions in Latvia and Estonia, or the likes of Ukraine's Bandera and his OUN and UPA, and the Waffen SS, it seeks to honor eastern European collaborators with Hitler and the Holocaust by repackaging these rightists, a reality shielded from the U.S. public.

Reader Comments - Gaza War - Israel, Palestine, the Jewish community and Zionism; Why Is Washington Risking War With Russia?; Labor - Kellogg Lockout and Coal Miners Anger; The Whitewashing of James Brown; Criminal Prosecution for Environmental Crimes; Bill Gates and the testing industry; Teacher Tenure (video); Celebrate the Life of Vito Marcantonio - Aug 9; 9th annual Dissident Arts Festival - Aug 16 - both in New York Today in History

Kiev's siege of the Donbass, supported by the Obama administration, is escalating an already perilous crisis.