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Russia Bristles, Pentagon Viagra Budget, Veggie Tech Wear

Russia Bristles, Pentagon Viagra Budget, Veggie Tech Wear

CALL FOR PEACEKEEPERS RANKLES RUSSIA
Russia reacted strongly to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s call yesterday for UN peacekeepers to be deployed in eastern Ukraine. Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said it “raises suspicions that he wants to destroy the Minsk accords,” the BBC reports. Pro-Russian rebels encircling the town of Debaltseve had refused to lay down their weapons despite the ceasefire that officially began Sunday, claiming the town was their own territory.

  • According to French President Francois Hollande’s office, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France talked on the phone earlier today, during which both Poroshenko and Putin denounced the ceasefire breach and called for full implementation of the Minsk agreement.

ON THIS DAY
[rebelmouse-image 27088667 alt="""" original_size="320x245" expand=1]
On Feb. 19, 1963,
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published. Time for your 57-second shot of history.

OBAMA VS. EXTREMISM
During a counter-extremism summit in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama urged more than 60 countries to join the fight against violent extremism and terrorist groups such as ISIS. “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” he said, adding that it was crucial “to confront squarely and honestly the twisted ideologies” that target young people,The New York Times reports. This came amid claims that ISIS is harvesting organs from slain civilians for money. The United Nations said it would launch an investigation.

  • Libya’s foreign minister, meanwhile, asked the UN to lift a weapons embargo to help the army fight the rise of an ISIS-affiliated group. But critics have repeatedly blamed the lack of a functioning government since the 2011 uprising as the main reason for the rise of extremist groups.

VERBATIM
“It was like a near-death experience without the inconvenience of coming close to dying,” Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste told the BBC about his 400 days in an Egyptian prison.

GREECE REQUESTS LOAN EXTENSION
After days of tough negotiations, Greece has formally asked the European Union for a six-month extension of its current bailout program in a last-ditch effort to avoid running out of cash at the end of the month, AFP reports. Eurozone finance ministers will meet in Brussels tomorrow afternoon to discuss a potential agreement. Greece has been trying not to renew the current bailout program and the austerity measures attached to it, but the loan request will buy the government some time to begin implementing reforms.

SNAPSHOT
Photo above: Cheong Kam Ka/Xinhua/ZUMA
People in Macau, southeastern China, perform a “dragon dance” Thursday to ring in the Year Of The Sheep.

$41.6 MILLION
The Pentagon spent $84 million on erectile dysfunction drugs for active and retired service members last year, including $41.6 million on Viagra alone, a report in The Military Times shows.

NIGER VILLAGE BOMBED
At least 37 people were killed Tuesday after a military plane dropped a bomb on a village in Niger, on the border with Nigeria. Survivors are blaming the Nigerian army for the attack, CNN reports. Nigerian officials have denied the charge, saying the army wasn’t conducting air raids against Boko Haram that day. According to Radio France Internationale, the bomb fell on a mosque during a funeral ceremony. The incident is likely to worsen an already tense situation between the two countries, as Boko Haram threatens the whole region.

FRANCE REGISTERS DEFLATION
Consumer prices in France fell 1% in January, meaning the year-on-year inflation rate was -0.4%, the lowest since 2009, business dailyLes Échos reports.

MY GRAND-PÈRE’S WORLD
[rebelmouse-image 27088668 alt="""" original_size="610x600" expand=1]


JEB BUSH HIS “OWN MAN”
Possible Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush distanced himself from the legacies of his father and brother in a speech outlining his vision for U.S. foreign policy, CNN reports. “I love my father and my brother,” the former Florida governor said. “I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make. But I am my own man.” But The Washington Post reports that 19 of his 21 advisors, including neoconservative hawk Paul Wolfowitz, worked for his father or brother, sometimes both. He also slammed Obama’s foreign policy, which he said had “left America less influential in the world,” and sided with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran and U.S. officials will resume negotiations tomorrow.

WORLDCRUNCH-TO-GO
As Clarin’s Berto Gonzalez Montaner reports, architectural and planning innovations have given new life to Bilbao, Spain, transforming it from a grey post-industrial city into a trendy tourist destination. “‘This used to be all filth,’ a local recalled of the area before. ‘All the industrial and sewage waste ended up in the river, which was completely polluted and gave off an unbearable stench. When it rained a lot and the sea rose, the waters of the Nervion could not be evacuated, so there was flooding. All the way to the Arriaga theater at the gates of the old quarter there were up to four meters of water!’ But when they took the polluting factories out of town, created the treatment plant and cleaned the river, everything changed.”
Read the full article, The Story Of Bilbao: Clean A River, Save The City.

VEGGIE TECH WEAR
Forget about Google Glass or the Apple Watch. This Japanese wearable tomato machine is the real deal.

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FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

My Gaza Diary: The Massacre Has Resumed, Nowhere To Hide

Three days since the truce ended, the Israeli army announced that it had launched 10,000 airstrikes on Gaza since the beginning of the war. Total war continues, with the invader’s fiercest fight waged against life itself.

Photo of Palestinians among rubble in Gaza

Palestinians stand among rubble in Rafah, Gaza

Moustafa Ibrahim*

RAFAH — On the evening of the 57th day of the war, I was facing a situation that no one would envy.

A friend from Jordan called to tell me her brother and his children, who had been displaced from Gaza City to Rafah, were injured by a bombing in the Al-Geneina neighborhood in eastern Rafah, where I now live. She wanted to check on them. As soon as she mentioned her brother's name, I knew that he had been killed. I told her: “I will ask at the hospital, and will let you know.”

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At that moment I stopped thinking. What would I say to her? It is not easy to be the one who tells a friend their loved one is dead.

The next day, the friend called back to say she’d found out her brother had been killed, and that his wife and children had been injured but were fine. She asked this time for help to search for her five-year-old nephew, who was missing and had not wound up at the hospital. After hours of searching, they found his body. He died too from the bombing.

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