Rebel News - Independent News and Analysis

During a visit to Kosovo this summer, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie met with a remarkable group of children. The young Kosovar boys had each been born soon after NATO's bombing campaign successfully drove Serbian forces from the province in 1999. More significantly, each child was named Tonibler in Blair's honor.

As one of the boys' mothers put it: "I hope to God that he grows up to be like Tony Blair or just a fraction like him."

Over the course of the last week, Russia has celebrated the second anniversary of its war with Georgia in typical style: A visit by President Dmitry Medvedev to the breakway province of Abkhazia, which Russia now recognizes as an independent country, and the announcement by a Russian general that the air force had stationed in Abkhazia the S-300, a highly sophisticated anti-aircraft system, to counter unspecified Georgian threats. While the Georgians, who tend to treat each new act of Russian provocation as a prelude to apocalypse, reacted with alarm, a State Department spokesman waved off the S-300 as old news. Barack Obama's administration has tried -- successfully, so far -- to strike a balance between defending Georgia and preserving the "reset" with Russia. But what will it do if Russia simply refuses to withdraw from territories seized in an illegal and unjust war?

The view of a failing Europe is en vogue, and for understandable reasons. The contours of crisis are glaring: bloated budgets, aging populations, declining military capabilities, and the fracturing of political solidarity over a range of issues from Russia and energy to enlargement and Turkey. Such is the conventional wisdom about a once too-comfortable Europe, now in decline, and yet amazingly still in the midst of its sacred five-week summer holiday.

TBILISI — Young couples sip wine in sidewalk cafes and children play in fountains, seeking relief from the searing heat. Elsewhere, elderly men play chess on park benches and traders hawk their wares from makeshift kiosks. It's another summer in Georgia's scruffy, chaotic, but charming capital. But there's one change this season: For the first time in years, there are no rumors of war.

Hello—I’m Lance Boyle, and I’ll be your host for “Modern Classics,” a new movie feature coming soon to WTFN. We’ll show you classic works of literature and film that have been adapted, sometimes very freely, to bring to life our political reality. Here’s a sneak peek at a Canadian adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s 1604 masterpiece The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. The story has been played and re-interpreted by other masters over the centuries—Mann, Goethe, Gounod—but its central theme has remained unchanged: a bored, frustrated but otherwise bright man sells his soul to gratify his ambitions. Here are a few scenes from Layton Tendencies.

"I've already been here for 960 days, and today is the 961st," said the weather-beaten Tatar man, squinting beneath the powerful Crimean sun.

Seydamet Smailov has spent almost three years living alone in a dilapidated cabin by the side of a busy road in the Ukrainian city of Simferopol because he has a vital task to accomplish: standing guard over a pile of bricks.

When your country, simmering for days in record-breaking heat, suddenly bursts into flame in 831 places, destroying half a million acres of land, killing 52 people, blanketing your capital in toxic smoke, and threatening to release old Chernobyl radiation into the atmosphere, someone has to take charge. If you're the Russian president, however, you will not be that person. You will sit in your office while your prime minister, his sleeves rolled up the way men of action tend to roll them up when they mean business, goes and tours the devastation, talks to grieving villagers, and shows the country that, hey, he's on it.

The Black Boxes have been recovered from the Smolensk plane crash that killed a good portion of the government of Poland. One news source reports “Russian officials (say the) engines of the Tupolev TU-154 aircraft ran flawlessly right up to the crash near the western city of Smolensk, the agency quoted the leader of the Interstate Aviation Committee, Tatiana Anodina, as saying. A fire or an explosion on board has also been ruled out following an analysis of the plane’s black box and an examination of the debris. One more black box has been recovered at the crash site, Anodina noted. Its recording is being studied jointly with Polish officials.”

Internet got a shocking video was recorded at the crash site Polish Presidential TU-154, appeared before the emergency services there. For an amateur recording of the wreck very carefully you will see a broken plane. In the distance the other part of the flaming wreckage.

BusinessWeek reported yesterday that Andrzej Olechowski will enter a presidential race in Poland to replace Lech Kaczynski.

“The Polish Peasants’ Party, the junior partner in the governing coalition, will probably nominate its leader, Economy Minister Waldemar Pawlak, and Andrzej Olechowski, a former foreign minister and finance minister, will run as an independent,” it is reported.