AndreasHG

Stop posting nonsense. I understand that the St. Petersburg troll factory must keep you guys busy, but there is a limit and that limit is decency. The Korean Airlines flight was shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 on September 1, 1983. It took the Soviets 5 days to recognize that the Boeing had been shot down and another three days to admit that they knew where the wreckage was located. But even when admitting the downing of the Boeing 747 by a missile attack, the Soviets kept on lying. For 9 years and until 1992, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin finally disclosed five top-secret memos dating from a few weeks after the downing of KAL 007 in 1983. The memos contained Soviet communications (from KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov and Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov to General Secretary Yuri Andropov) that indicated that they knew the location of KAL 007's wreckage while they were simulating a search and harassing the American Navy; they had found the sought-after cockpit voice recorder on October 20, 1983 (50 days after the incident); but they had decided to keep this knowledge secret, the reason being that the tapes could not support that KAL 007's flight to Soviet territory was a deliberately planned intelligence mission. What would be the point of lying for 9 consecutive years if the killing was the result of a legitimate, proportionate and well-considered action? It's simple: the action was not legitimate, not proportionate, and it was even reckless. This was a cold-blooded murder of the 269 people on board, including 22 children under the age of 12 and 23 active crew members plus 6 deadheading crew members. Russia never paid any compensation to the families of victims of the Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007 disaster. Compare it to the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the US Navy, on the morning of 3 July 1988. The Department of Defense (DoD) officials initially said that Vincennes had shot down an Iranian F-14, but issued a retraction within hours and confirmed Iranian reports that the target was instead a civilian Airbus. In February 1996, the U.S. agreed to pay Iran US$131.8 million. US$61.8 million of the claim was in compensation for the 248 Iranians killed in the shootdown: $300,000 per wage-earning victim and $150,000 per non-wage-earner. As part of the settlement, the US agreed to send Iran two Airbus A300-600s, the first Western planes to be supplied to the country since 1980 (after the 1979 Iranian revolution). This is what a decent country does.

Actually I already replied to a similar comment and I stand by what I said. Of course, for a Russian who has never experienced living in an open society is difficult to understand. ” Cover-ups in open, democratic societies simply don't work. In the event of an incident, the simple implementation of follow-up, corrective and prevention measures, involving tents of people, playing different roles within an organization, is almost impossible to hide and a clear sign that something went wrong. Cover-ups only work under totalitarian regimes, or in the sick minds of conspiracy theorists and in Hollywood movies, which spare no effort to undermine Americans' trust in national institutions. Those who don't understand this do not understand the true nature of open, democratic societies, vs totalitarian ones. And very likely don't deserve to live as free men and women in an open society. ”

Then rest assured the downing of the Azerbaijani flight will be blamed on the Russians

If there was even a remote possibility that a Ukrainian drone caused this incident, you can rest assured Russia would have already denounced it. The reality is that drones are not designed to shoot down planes.

Thaibeachlover, this is nonsense. I know you are paid to post these meaningless comments. Below the list of presidents Ukraine elected in contested democratic elections since its independence for 1991. Side by side to the Russian ones. Note that during Medvedev presidency Putin was the prime minister. and was the de-facto man in charge in Russia. Since 1999 Putin effectively ruled Russia poisoning opponents, having then shot in front of their homes or at the doorsteps of the Kremlin, thrown from high-floor windows, murdered in prison, etc., etc. Putin is the epitome of the many criminals who ruled Russia as dictators, tzars or tzarinas. Any idiot understands it.

What is the exact type of violence that is appropriate, once an inmate has been handcuffed and restrained? What can he do of so damaging? Insulting the correction officers' mothers, sisters and wives? Since when correction officers have been appointed prosecutors, judges, jurors and executioners, with the right to impose a death sentence, to be carried out on the spot and without appeal? This is not America. This is Syria, Sudan, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Myanmar, maybe China, you name it... But it's not America.

This is a stark (and also rather inaccurate) statement. Can you explain on what basis you believe that "Ukraine itself is an artificial creation"? What do you know about Ukraine's history that justifies your statement? What do you know about the Ukrainian language that makes you believe it is "artificial"? What have you seen in Kiev, Lvov, Moscow and St. Petersburg, that supports the idea that Ukraine is an artificial country? What is it that Ukrainians shall know, to accept the idea that they are not Ukrainians after all? And that dying for Ukraine, as they are doing by the thousands since 2014, has no justification. I look forward to hearing what supports and justifies your point of view, if any, of course, and to share it with my Ukrainian friends asking for their opinions.

Does it really matter what motorbikes are or are not allowed to do in Thailand? Don't motorcyclists do as they please anyway?

China has stopped rewarding excellence in education a long time ago. Ideological conformity is what is rewarded nowadays in China. And the price will become evident only in the years to come as one of the legacies of Xi Jinping's ruling. Xi Jinping’s Ideologization of the Chinese Academy – The Diplomat - https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/xi-jinpings-ideologization-of-the-chinese-academy/

Cover-ups in open, democratic societies simply don't work. In the event of an incident, the simple implementation of follow-up, corrective and prevention measures, involving tents of people, playing different roles within an organization, is almost impossible to hide and a clear sign that something went wrong. Cover-ups only work under totalitarian regimes, or in the sick minds of conspiracy theorists and in Hollywood movies, which spare no effort to undermine Americans' trust in national institutions. Those who don't understand this do not understand the true nature of open, democratic societies, vs totalitarian ones. And very likely don't deserve to live as free men and women in an open society.

The only problem is that this means more suffering and death in Ukraine. If it were not for the price paid by Ukraine, I would say let the war continue until the Russians understand that living under a dictatorship, and the false sense of security it can provide, comes at a very high price. But even when the war is over, Russia's troubles will only have just begun.

In an article published today by the Washington Post, Max Boot updates the readers on the downing of the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243. Of the 67 passengers and crew, 38 died, and many of the 29 survivors are in bad shape. "Russian spokesmen blamed a bird collision, but a preliminary Azerbaijani investigation — backed by Western aviation experts and U.S. officials — concluded that a Russian antiaircraft missile most likely brought down the plane. Azerbaijani officials told local media that not only did Russian fire damage the airplane, but Russian authorities also jammed its electronics and denied it permission to land, forcing it to divert across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan." Evidently the Russians hoped that the plane would sink to the Caspian seabed making any investigation on the causes of the incident extremely difficult. "Such accidents, admittedly, happen in wartime everywhere. On Sunday, a U.S. guided-missile cruiser in the Red Sea mistakenly shot down a Navy F/A-18 fighter that it probably mistook for a Houthi drone or missile (the pilot and a weapons officer survived with minor injuries after ejecting). In 1988, a U.S. warship battling Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger aircraft that it mistook for an Iranian fighter aircraft, killing 290 people." "But when civilized nations commit such offenses, they apologize and make reparations. They don’t refuse to admit what they did or try to blame someone else for their actions." "That, however, has been the Kremlin’s reprehensible pattern dating from the 1983 downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 — making its protestations of innocence in Wednesday’s case all the more dismissible." "A decade ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, went down over a portion of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed forces, killing 298 passengers and crew. The Kremlin denied responsibility and spun out various conspiracy theories, blaming the crash on either a Ukrainian fighter jet or some kind of elaborate CIA plot. (A Russian website even bizarrely claimed that the passengers were already dead when the plane took off.) Eventually a Dutch-led investigation proved that the airplane had been brought down by a Russian Buk surface-to-air missile system fired from the Russian-controlled region of Ukraine." This pattern is repeated every time there is an incident in Russia. Think about Chernobyl: The Chernobyl disaster began on 26 April 1986 with the explosion of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat. As the plant was run by authorities in Moscow, the government of Ukraine did not receive prompt information on the accident. On April 28, radiation levels set off alarms at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden,[67][68] over 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from the Chernobyl Plant. That day, the Swedish government contacted the Soviet government to inquire about whether there had been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union. The Soviets initially denied it. It was only after the Swedish government suggested they were about to file an official alert with the International Atomic Energy Agency that the Soviet government admitted that an accident had taken place at Chernobyl. At first, the Soviets only conceded that a minor accident had occurred, but once they began evacuating more than 100,000 people, the full scale of the situation was realized by the global community. Lying through your teeth, even when unnecessary and easily refuted, must be encoded in Russia's DNA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/27/azerbaijan-flight-crash-russia-ukraine-history/

LOL. At present the only thing Farage stopped is the Conservative Party. The Conservatives are responsible for bringing havoc upon themselves, having done a terrible job with immigration, which was allowed to increase exponentially after Boris Johnson's 2019 election victory and especially after Brexit. But Reform UK gave the Tories a helping hand. By dividing the right-leaning votes, Farage delivered a victory of historic proportions to Labour. And as long as voters on the right remain divided, Labor won't have to worry about ending up in the opposition. Farage and Reform UK are Labour's best friends.

Reading BS from notoriously biased websites is not research: it's stupidity. There is a very simple way to assess how much Central Banks believe in the official inflation data related to their currencies. It's a simple, mistake-proof (and idiot-proof) test. I did some research and below are the data. Do you see anything that stands out? But with regards to economic data, the Russian numbers must be really ugly, so much that Rosstat doesn't even bother to cook them anymore. It just stopped publishing them. Here is a list of the main indexes Russia stopped publishing: https://www.hhs.se/en/about-us/news/site-publications/2023/russias-data-warfare/ https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2022/07/secret-economy-what-hiding-the-stats-does-for-russia?lang=en Now, since you are a serious researcher, share a link to those indicators and prove that both the Swedish and the Carnegie's publications are mistaken, and that those indicators are still available. In my opinion you should be up to the task, and I am looking forward to see the result of your research project.

When it comes to quality of the (sweet) bakery, my favored is Paul bakery, not available in Hua Hin. The scent and flavor of the real butter and the few selected natural ingredients used in its recipes are a triumph of simplicity and pastry art. Starbucks is a chemical laboratory not a bakery. Its chemists and physicists playing with artificial flavours, colorants and preservatives to bake eyes appealing cakes. Those cakes stay fresh on the shelves for days in a row, worryingly without showing any sign of decay. I never performed the test, but I am under impression that they may glow of an innatural violet light when observed in the dark. But it's just my opinion, and to each its own.

Frankly speaking (and with due respect) if you really believe that the ‘only reliable and consistently good experience has been with Starbucks’, then I believe you set the bar unusually low when it comes to food. No surprise you get food poisoning.

Leaving the EU didn’t help at all: quite the opposite. Are you sure about leaving also the ECHR? Because if it goes the same way of Brexit, the consequences for the UK can be devastating.

The ones who shall feel ashamed for the death of the Russian soldiers are those who send them to their death: Putin and his accomplices. What are they dying for? To add some more square kilometers to the already largest country by landmass on planet Earth? To increase the number of subjects of an empire that in its thousand-year history has only been able to produce misery, servitude and bloodshed? Is it worth it? Are human lives worth so little? The answer is yes. In Russia human lives are as disposable as Tampax tampons.

The photos of the wreck and the videos shot by the passengers in the last moments of the flight are convincing proof that a missile sealed the fate of this aircraft. Shame on you and all the St. Petersburg trolls active here, for disrespecting the victims of this accident by denying the facts that caused their deaths, even in the face of such compelling evidence. You sold your humanity in exchange for a handful of banknotes and agreed to defend a criminal and murderous regime, thus becoming accomplices to its crimes.

The Nation adds some more details. But there are two conflicting depictions of the incident: in one Thanakarn was paid to drink. In the second, he "was not hired to drink. Previously, Thanakarn had already finished one bottle of liquor before vomiting. When he drank more, many people tried to stop him, but he refused." https://www.nationthailand.com/news/general/40044539

And wouldn't you mind sharing this knowledge with us? What is your source? Quite often the news printed in Moscow differ from that published on our side of the border? An example is the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8432: Russia news outlets insist it was caused by "birds". Exclusive: Preliminary investigation confirms Russian missile caused Azerbaijan Airlines crash | Euronews

This statement is not correct. Putin came to power for the first time on Decembre 31, 1999. The Ruble went through four distinct phases since then: 2000-2008 foreign investments, economic growth, political stability: a strong Ruble progressively appreciated from approximately 28₽ to approximately 20₽ to the US$ in 2008. It is the period that Russians remember most favorably. 2008-2014 (subprime financial crisis): Consequent oil & gas price collapse (from $145.85 per barrel in 2008 to $39.09 per barrel in 2009) and, understandably, the Ruble with it. Approximately 30₽ to 35₽ were required to buy 1 US$ till 2014. 2014-2022 (invasion of Crimea): The EU and the USA introduce the first set of sanctions intended to deter Russia from further aggressive actions. The ruble loses further value and stabilizes between 60₽ and 80₽ per dollar. 2022-Today: 2022 invasion of Donbass, Donetsk, Luhansk, etc. The ruble loses further value and heads toward a valuation of 95₽ and 110₽ per USD. Please, note that the graph below ends in July 2023 and is not updated to the end of this year. Russia is a Banana Republic for the very reason that its economic fortunes depend greatly upon a limited number of commodities, which are exported. A Banana Republic is "a small nation, especially in Central America, dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital".

I'm not so sure that most people who leave their home countries are losers. But I agree that those who disparage the country they come from are mostly losers.

If I "make it 12 years" the 'Rubble' depreciation is steeper, not smoother. Calculated from December 26, 2012, the Ruble has lost 69% of its value against the USD (see the graphs below). Twelve years ago, the Ruble was worth a bit more than $0.03 (three cents). Today it is worth only one cent. It's a typical trend of the currencies of the Sovereign Banana Republics, despite Russia being troubled by a climate so cold that banana harvesting is impossible and Russia pretending to be a player in the big world powers game. As I stated in previous posts, Russia is an economic dwarf trying desperately to punch above its weight.

Индексы (romir.ru) ROMIR is an independent Russian institute of research and economic analysis (Russia's largest private research company). From November 2024 the Kremlin forbids ROMIR to publish any inflation datas because they are detrimental of the war effort, undermine the public trust in Putin's government economic wisdom, and negatively affect the morale of the Russian public. No one was jailed because the methodology used to calculate inflation was beyond reproach. But the data can no longer be published, under penalty of prison and heavy fines.