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UKRAINE’S DEFENCE CHIEF has accused Russia of sending 6,000 troops and 30 armoured personnel carriers into Crimea as the restive peninsula tries to gain broader independence from new pro-EU leaders in Kiev.
Defence Minister Igor Tenyukh told a cabinet meeting that Russia began sending these reinforcements yesterday “without warning or Ukraine’s permission, in defiance of the principle of non-infringement of state borders.”
The move comes as an AFP journalist said more than 10,000 people carrying Russian flags began protesting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the stronghold of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.
Protesters declared they supported “the aspirations of Crimea to rejoin Russia”, referring to Ukraine’s pro-Russia peninsula further south where Kiev has accused Moscow of launching an “armed invasion.”
The defence chief spoke as dozens of pro-Russian armed men in full combat gear patrolled outside the seat of power in Crimea’s capital Simferopol, a day after similar gunmen seized control over airports and government buildings in the territory.
The rugged peninsula jutting into the Black Sea — host to a Kremlin fleet and with an ethnic Russian majority — has now effectively been cut off from mainland Ukraine, with airports shut down and a pro-Kremlin militia establishing a tightly-controlled checkpoint on the main road from the mainland.
Crimea has come to the fore of a Cold War-style confrontation between the West and Russia over Ukraine, a faceoff that has also exposed the ancient cultural rifts between the pro-European west and Russian-speaking south and east of this country of 46 million.
Added to that, a referendum to determine whether residents in the flashpoint peninsula want greater autonomy has been pushed forward to March 30, the spokeswoman of the region’s newly-chosen prime minister Sergiy Aksyonov said.
The vote had originally been planned for May 25, on the same day as presidential elections set by parliament following the ouster of the pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych.
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Agree 100%. The ignorance around proper wildlife and ecosystem conservation is appalling.
@Patricia Cautley: yeah but the Healey raes will get contracts.
@Mr “JonnieBoy” Johnson: I don’t like the Healy-Raes but taking out contracts on them is going a bit far don’t you think.
@Patricia Cautley: Baby steps for the Irish psyche
We have hedgerows barren of any life, regularly cut in deeply destructive ways, not even wildflowers except in very few places and precious few new trees allowed come through for the future. We have way fewer birds and insects than we should. Barren destroyed boglands everywhere.
But sure as long as there’s no money in farming farmers will continue denuding our landscape for the no money that’s apparently in it.
We need to come to agreements with farmers of poor quality agricultural lands to purchase their lands for the state. We need to preserve the best agricultural lands for agriculture, not just beef fattening. Some beef obvs but we need to diversify our foodstuffs, vary our produce and production methods and use shorter/local supply chains for our food, we need to feed ourselves! Ideally doing that well! We need to collaborate with the farming community in the best interests of all not just the select few.
Whether you think it’s going to get worse or better in the future, these are just the kinds of things we need to do. All need to make like grown ups and not let ourselves be divided against our own interests.
@Chutes: I assume you are a farmer as your so knowledgeable on farming!
@Chutes: you must live in eastern Europe going by your description of the landscape
@P. V. Aglue: It’s an accurate description of county Kerry.
Having visited the National Park in the Pyrenees many times I can only say what a spectacular landscape it is. Here flora and fauna thrive in abundance and herds of cattle roam the uplands. There is hiking and mountain climbing in the summer and skiing in the winter…none of these activities take from the wildness of the place. Some self styled environmentalists seem to think that for nature to thrive all human activity must cease. How wrong they are.
It sounds like am Irish solution to an Irish problem: saying you’re going to do it is action enough.
Reminds me of a story about the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan: he once handed an IOU to a creditor and said ‘Thank God that’s settled!’.
@Brendan : I am from the Human Race; what ‘race’ are you from?
That is a question I ask you in order to demonstrate there are no favoured or less favoured ‘races’ in your defence of Darwin who thought the Irish were a problem because they existed.
“Thus the reckless, degraded, careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” Darwin
@Gerald Kelleher: I have no reason to defend Darwin’s views on racial superiority. I am totally against all that, and I agree that there is just the human race.
Sadly, racism does exist in the world. Logically it shouldn’t, as you never tire of pointing out, but it does, as its victims can attest. Logic is not generally one of humanity’s strong points.
@Brendan: To be a racist, you need to believe in ‘races’ so prejudice exists in the world, that is not a biological principle and certainly not written as an evolutionary narrative where the Irish problem is that our society exists at all.
“A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan. – The Times, 1848
I know that somewhere, there is a part of you that cannot hold contradictory viewpoints and out of editorials like that one, natural selection grew out of famine Ireland with its favoured and less favoured ‘races’.
The academic community could affirm that the only valid distinction is between male and female rather than the invalid ‘races’ but they are stuck and cannot do so.
It is not possible to define climate as long-term weather.
@Gerald Kelleher: I can define a Gerald as flying fish if I so wish, it’s about who accepts your definitions Gerald. Who accepts your particular definitions, myriad and odd as they might sometimes seem?
@Gerald Kelleher: Technically, belief in races is called racialism. Racism is merely prejudice against somebody because of their ethnicity.
Most reactions don’t require or dignify a response.
The Nazis followed natural selection as an academic imperative to exterminate ‘races’ considered inferior for the same colonial excuses as the dangerously reasons as British empire building.
Hard to imagine a group of people worse than the Nazis yet there you have it among our own society.
In other words, people imagined the Government was buying a park for walking and enjoying the scenery, but the environmentalists rush in with a different definition for a park.
I know of another authority, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), that lately tried to redefine a planet while unaware that the planets are not defined in isolation but observed as an external feature where they wander while the Sun goes directly through the constellations.
“Moreover, we see the other five planets also retrograde at times and stationary at either end [of the regression]. And whereas the Sun always advances along its own direct path, they wander in various ways, straying sometimes to the south and sometimes to the north; that is why they are called “planets” [wanderers].” Copernicus
@Gerald Kelleher: To hell with the IAU. Who actually gives them the right to decide what is or what isn’t a planet, or what it, or other stellar bodies can be called?
If I was to find a new planet, I should be allowed to name it whatever the hell I want, whether it’s Cybertron, or Planet Bob.
@Benny The IAU people got into trouble with their planet definition and decided to demote Pluto as a planet and now start to call it a dwarf planet. When is a dwarf human not a human?.
People know what a human is without the need for definitions, the same with time, space and motion. All that fuss of Newton trying to define those things which everyone knows intrinsically created havoc to suit his experimental methods and hide astronomy behind a pile of worthless voodoo.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-stm/scholium.html
Behind those worthless definitions is a misadventure with timekeeping and a research-ending vandalism to astronomical methods and principles.
If environmentalists want themselves and society to appreciate nature then forget laws of nature.
It’s all tokenism, it seems to me. Haven’t heard the cuckold in years. Our water quality continues to decline.
But we do feed “50 million people”. Hooray!!?
That total waste of time, judge No…,is a disgrace. Get him to f… out an already pointless, ineffective system. So angry.
I have my own few acres of rewilding on an Island off the coast and my joy this morning at the Cockpheasant crowing was an added bonus,but the ferry will come with the tourists and they will stand on my walls and generally leave their poo etc behind.Perhaps designating a place as a National Park might be curse on Nature,worse than that of the ” WILD ATLANTIC WAY.” TOURISTS driving from one Office to the next to get their card stamped.!!!!!!
I feel sorry for the people who died on account of the academic conviction of natural selection as they didn’t deserve the influence of weak minds that still exist on their lives and their deaths.
That world is supposed to be gone.
a big fat vanity project to get cabbage heads face on the media..nothing to do with saving nature
A marine national park down there. Absolutely taking the piss. They are destroying the marine area down in kerry with salmon farms and inshore fishing to feed these farmed fish. Its all about money to the government. They don’t give a shit about the environment.
have your say