Kiev, Ukraine (CNN) -- Armed men clashed with Ukrainian border guards Saturday after a separatist leader was detained at a checkpoint. He was trying to re-enter the country from Russia, the Ukrainian Border Service said. The incident is the latest violent flare-up in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russia separatists staged a referendum on independence last weekend. Luhansk's self-declared "people's governor" Valeriy Bolotov -- who is wanted by Ukraine's Security Service -- was stopped at the Dovzhanskiy checkpoint, the border service statement said. Following his detention, about 200 armed men arrived at the checkpoint and demanded his release. Ukraine ballots can they get to voters? Voters in eastern Ukraine cast ballots Living in the president's compound Photos: Crisis in Ukraine The border guards tried to avoid bloodshed, but after an altercation, shots were fired. In the ensuing armed assault on the checkpoint, "the attackers" were able to take back Bolotov, the statement said. The were no casualties in the incident, separatist spokesman Vasiliy Nikitin said. The fight involved about 150 fighters on each side, he said. Bolotov had gone to Russia for medical treatment after being wounded on Tuesday. Tensions remain high across the country's east, with just over a week to go before May 25 presidential elections. Separatist groups have declared "people's republics" in both Luhansk and Donetsk. Neither the West nor the interim government in Kiev consider the two regions' referendum on independence as legitimate. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. government rejects Denis Pushilin, the self-declared leader of the Donetsk People's Republic, who asserted earlier this week that his region is not only independent, but also will ask to join Russia "These pro-Russia separatists have never been elected and do not represent the people of the region," Psaki said Saturday. "... Any decisions made about Ukraine must be taken by those with lawful authority, representing the citizens of Ukraine as a whole, and not under threat of foreign military intervention." Separatist leader: Donetsk region asking to join Russia Russia slams Kiev military operation Russia's Foreign Ministry called Saturday for an end to what the Kiev government describes as an anti-terrorist operation against the separatists -- and questioned whether it was possible to hold elections given the militarized situation. In its statement, the ministry accused Ukrainian troops backed by aircraft of trying to storm the town of Slovyansk and of using heavy artillery to shell "civilian installations." "Such punitive action against its own citizens shows the hypocrisy of the Kiev authorities," the statement said, referring to an international pact agreed to last month which called for an end to violence. Ukraine's official news agency Ukrinform cited the nation's Defense Ministry Saturday as saying that Ukrainian forces continue to "fully control" the situation around Slovyansk, a stronghold of pro-Russia militants. The militants have put up 27 barricades around the town, where they still hold a number of public buildings, the Defense Ministry is quoted as saying. Report: Human rights worsening A U.N. report released Friday shows an "alarming deterioration" of human rights in eastern Ukraine, said the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay. The report paints a troubling picture, citing cases of targeted killings, torture, beatings, abductions and sexual harassment, as well as intimidation of the media. It also highlighted serious problems in Crimea, Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula that was annexed by Russia in March, particularly for the minority ethnic Tatar population. Russia's Foreign Ministry dismissed the findings of the U.N. report, saying it showed a "complete lack of objectivity, total inconsistencies and double standards." Kiev and the West have condemned the annexation of Crimea and accuse Moscow of backing the pro-Russia militants in Ukraine's east. Moscow blames the unrest in Ukraine on far-right ultranationalist groups. Journalist Victoria Butenko reported from Kiev and Laura Smith-Spark wrote in London. CNN's Radina Gigova and Arkady Irshenko contributed to this report.
(CNN) -- A Boko Haram video emerged Monday purportedly showing some of the kidnapped Nigerian girls in Muslim headdresses and the terror group's leader declaring they have converted to Islam. The video, released by French news agency Agence France-Presse, was shot in a nondescript bush area and showed about 100 girls. In the 27-minute footage, the terror group's leader, Abubakar Shekau , says he is willing to exchange the schoolgirls for Boko Haram prisoners. It shows girls dressed in black and gray hijabs, and reciting the Quran as they make Islamic declarations of faith. Shekau appears in a separate part of the video, but never with the girls. Escaped girl recalls kidnapping ordeal Nigerian father: Nothing has been done First lady: Kidnappings 'unconscionable' Photos: Nigerians protest over kidnapped girls "Praise be to Allah, the lord of the world," the girls in the video chant. It's the first purported sighting of the girls abducted last month in the northern town of Chibok. A convoy of Islamist militants drove to a school, seized nearly 300 girls and fled into the night. At least 276 girls remain missing since the terror group abducted them on April 14. Though some of the girls escaped shortly after their abduction, none of the others have been found. A daring escape One of the escapees told CNN's Nima Elbagir how she made a dash for freedom after militants loaded them into trucks and drove them into the nearby Sambisa Forest. "We ran into the bush," she said of her escape with two others. "We ran and we ran." Lost and terrified, she said, they later ran toward flames they presumed were rising from a building set ablaze by the militants in their hometown. The escapees were lucky. The missing girls probably have been separated and taken out of the country by now, officials say. "The search must be in Niger, Cameroon and Chad, to see if we can find information," said Gordon Brown, a former UK prime minister and the U.N.'s special envoy for global education. But President Goodluck Jonathan says he believes the girls are still in the forest where the militants disappeared shortly after their capture.
(CNN) -- Moments after blasting what he called Russia's illegal "military aggression" of his nation, Ukraine's interim leader insisted Thursday that a peaceful resolution that ends with Kiev and Moscow becoming "real partners" is still possible. "We still believe that we have a chance to resolve these conflicts in a peaceful manner," interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told the U.N. Security Council. Yatsenyuk's remarks come as thousands of Russian troops staged military exercises not far from his nation's border.
Legalized Murder: The CIA's Greatest Hits (and Misses) Tweet share http://www.trutv.com/conspiracy/assassinations/cia-hits-misses/gallery.all.html Fidel Castro of Cuba (miss) AFP/Getty Images If you can devise a harebrained scheme the CIA has not yet used to try to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, you might want to send a memo to their Langley headquarters. A 2006 BBC documentary and companion book covered 638 known attempts on Castro's life. The CIA wasn't behind every botched hit on El Comandante , but it is well documented that the agency has hired the Mafia, poisoned seashells, infected a diving suit with fungus and tried to poison his food with drugs to make him appear irrational and insane (some of Fidel's rambling speeches make one wonder if the latter plot hadn't actually worked). According to the book, written by former Castro bodyguard Fabian Escalante, the assassination plots continued until at least 2000, when a former CIA operative was arrested for trying to blow up Castro's podium during a speech in Panama. None have worked, of course, and Castro remains alive—barely. Michael Manley of Jamaica (miss) Central Press/Getty Images U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was getting a bad Rastaman vibration from Michael Manley, who became the Jamaican prime minister in 1972. Manley was friendly with Cuba and the Soviets, and tried to implement moderate socialist policies. For these sins, the CIA targeted him with three unsuccessful assassination attempts—by Jamaican soldiers, Cuban exiles and Jamaican gunmen—during his successful 1976 reelection bid. The attempts were detailed in a 1977 investigative report in Penthouse magazine (some people read it for the articles). Ahmed Dlimi of Morocco (hit) AFP/Getty Images Officially, General Ahmed Dlimi was killed in a 1983 car accident. But that statement came from the government that allegedly had him killed with the support and help of the CIA. Dlimi was a close assistant to the Moroccan king, but also reportedly had ties to an underground military officers' movement dedicated to overthrowing the monarchy. He was also on the CIA's most wanted list because he advocated closer ties to the former colonial powers in France, rather than to the U.S. Another dissident officer and former Moroccan army lieutenant, who was then living in exile in Sweden, told Africa Today in 1983 that Hassan's security team undoubtedly had Dlimi killed, and the CIA helped them. Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran (miss) Keystone/Getty Images The CIA and the Muslim world got off on the wrong foot in 1953. In one of its first major global political actions, the CIA overthrew the popularly elected Iranian government and installed the corrupt and brutal Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore and then-Near East operations chief for the CIA, detailed the coup in a 1979 book, and Tim Weiner obtained two extensive classified histories of the coup for his award-winning history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes . The CIA and the British government spent millions of dollars trying to oust Mohammed Mossadegh, a popular politician whose crime was vowing to nationalize Iranian oil exploration. Mossadegh survived several assassination attempts during his two years in power, but was eventually deposed and held under house arrest while the Shah's secret police terrorized the country for more than 25 years. Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala (miss) Popperfoto/Getty Images The early CIA meddling in Guatemala sounds like a joke, with its backing by a fruit company and a phony arms-cache plan labeled Operation Washtub. But the agency was deadly serious about removing the governing socialists and restoring U.S. influence. In 1954, the CIA created a list of 58 assassination targets, and then trained gunmen, according to CIA documents that were declassified in 1997. But it never carried out the attacks. Instead, it remained in the shadows while the military junta it backed overthrew the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz. Sukarno of Indonesia (miss) Archive Photos/Getty Images Sukarno (like many Indonesians, he used only one name) had a good run for the leader of a country of 90 million people sitting on 20 billion barrels of oil and trending toward communism. CIA officer Richard Bissell told the Rockefeller Commission in 1975 that the agency had tried to assassinate Sukarno in 1955, but failed to devise a feasible plan. In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow Sukarno, according to CIA records described in the award-winning history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes . But the ensuing bloody coup failed. Sukarno finally fell in 1965 after an even bloodier revolution. The CIA wasn't heavily involved, but the agency helped establish and support the subsequent 32-year dictatorship of Sukarno's brutal successor, Suharto. Patrice Lumumba of the Congo (hit) Keystone/Getty Images While the CIA tried to take out Castro, the agency was also cooking up a plot against the Castro of Africa—literally. In 1960, a master chemist flew to the Congo with poison syringes for tainting the food, drink or toothpaste of the newly elected leader, who was suspected of being a communist. President Eisenhower ordered the hit during a National Security Council meeting, according to the Senate testimony of an NSC notetaker. However, the CIA station director backed down. Months later, Lumumba was captured and shot to death two days before John F. Kennedy's inauguration—officially on Belgian orders, but CIA memos discuss assassination by gunshot. General Abdel Karim Qasim of Iraq (miss) Popperfoto/Getty Images The CIA helped establish Saddam Hussein's bloody regime. It backed his Ba'ath party's overthrow of General Abdel Karim Qasim's military government, though it tried to kill Qasim first. He had overthrown the monarchy, exposed CIA ties to the royals and became friendly with communists. When the Ba'ath party initially failed to assassinate Qasim in a gunfight, the CIA's so-called Health Alteration Committee mailed a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief to Qasim, as detailed in a 1975 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Qasim apparently didn't need to blow his nose, so it took a bloody coup to unseat and kill him. Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia (miss) Keystone/Getty Images Prince Norodom Sihanouk had a solid plan: stay out of the Vietnam War. Perhaps the U.S. should have followed the same course. Instead, the CIA started to meddle in Cambodia and forced the prince to take sides. In his 1972 book, My War with the CIA , he recounted two assassination attempts against him and a 1958 coup attempt. He was finally overthrown in 1970, paving the way for full Cambodian involvement in the Vietnam War and a reign of terror by the vicious Khmer Rouge. Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic (hit) Archive Photos/Getty Images Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo was a brutal despot, but he was our brutal despot. After 30 years of looking the other way, the U.S. government decided Trujillo could no longer be trusted to fend off a communist revolution. The CIA armed a Dominican rebel group, which murdered Trujillo in 1961. The murder was never officially traced to CIA guns, but President Kennedy had sent a damning memo to the embassy in Santo Domingo approving the hit, as detailed in a 1975 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Jose Figueres of Costa Rica (miss) Time Life Pictures/Getty Images Jose Figueres is one of the few Latin American leaders to admit close ties to the CIA, claiming that he helped the agency "in 20,000 ways," including aiding the plot to overthrow Rafael Trujillo. However, he also alleges that the CIA has tried to kill him twice. He angered the agency by harboring and supporting exiles from a host of U.S.-friendly Latin American dictatorships. Charles de Gaulle of France (miss) Hulton Archive/Getty Images Franco-American relations were tense long before Congress replaced "French fries" with "freedom fries." In the mid-1960s, French dissidents and CIA officials plotted to arm an assassin with a poison ring and a military dress uniform—and slip him into a reception for French soldiers. As President Charles De Gaulle made his rounds to shake hands with the soldiers, the assassin would prick De Gaulle's hand with deadly poison, and then vanish into the crowd. Lest this sound like a Pink Panther plotline, a CIA briefing officer confirmed the story in his 1975 Congressional testimony, as recounted in a front page Chicago Tribune story at the time. Che Guevara of Argentina/Cuba (hit) CBS/Getty Images It might be said that the CIA killed Che Guevara twice. The iconic Cuban revolutionary took his battles against agency-backed Cubans as far as the Congo, where American officials thought he had been killed and dumped in an unmarked grave in April 1967, according to Douglas Henderson, then-Ambassador to Bolivia. However, he "rose from the dead" to fight again in October in Bolivia, where he was really killed. CIA officer Tom Polgar recounted the story for Legacy of Ashes author Tim Weiner, including the gory detail that a staffer at CIA headquarters had asked a Bolivian agent for fingerprints and a positive ID, to which the agent replied, "I can send fingers." It seems Che's executioners had cut off his hands. Rene Schneider of Chile (hit) Public Domain The CIA was ready to instigate a military coup and prevent Salvador Allende, a Marxist, from taking power. The only hitch: Rene Schneider, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, didn't believe the military had the right to block or overrule a legitimate and constitutional election. Therefore, the CIA had to take him out on the way to overthrowing Allende. It took three tries to nab the general. The final attempt was supposed to be a kidnapping, but Schneider pulled a gun and was shot several times. The assassination is detailed in the 2000 Hinchey Report on CIA Activities in Chile . Salvador Allende of Chile (miss?) AFP/Getty Images Even with Schneider out of the way, the military coup didn't materialize. Plan B was, of course, to take it upon ourselves to kill the popularly elected guy we didn't like. President Nixon and Henry Kissinger approved a CIA hit of Allende, and a White House paper discussed the various options for killing the Chilean president-elect, according to a book about Kissinger by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. They were never attempted, and Allende served for two years before the CIA-led coup in 1973 that led to 17 years of brutal military dictatorship by General Augusto Pinochet. Allende is generally believed to have committed suicide in the presidential palace during the coup, although rumors of assassination still persist. Orlando Letelier of Chile (hit) AFP/Getty Images Letelier (his remains are in the casket pictured) was the exiled voice of resistance to the repressive Pinochet regime in Chile, a regime the U.S. supported. To pull off this successful assassination in 1976, the CIA stuck close to home. The Chilean secret police, known as DINA, planted a car bomb that killed exiled Chilean diplomat Letelier and his assistant, Ronni Moffitt, on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. The head of DINA was a paid CIA asset before and after the killing. Declassified CIA memos have detailed CIA links to Pinochet, and his hand in the Letelier assassination. Manuel Noriega (miss) Getty Images In Panama, they called him "Pineapple Face." In Washington, he was called "friend," then "frienemy," then "enemy." During the "frienemy" phase, he was on the CIA payroll and the DEA hit list. A drug-enforcement official tried to convince President Nixon to have Noriega killed because he was responsible for so much drug trafficking. However, his drug connections were too valuable to the CIA, which used drug money to fund many of its covert operations. By 1989, Noriega had burned all his bridges in the CIA, and he was arrested during a U.S. military invasion. Omar Torrijos of Panama (hit) Public Domain The CIA certainly left Noriega in power long enough to do its dirty work. In 1981, Noriega was lieutenant commander of the Panama National Guard. Omar Torrijos was his boss, the guard commander and functioning head of the Panamanian government. Torrijos was killed in a plane crash. The official line is that his plane went down in a storm, but Noriega's former chief of staff testified in 1987 that Noriega had Torrijos killed at the behest of the CIA. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya (miss) AFP/Getty Images Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi has been a U.S. terrorist bogeyman for decades. President Reagan ramped up both the rhetoric and the actions. Through both the CIA and military, he tried covert programs and psychological warfare. Reagan also launched one of the deadliest and most condemned assassination attempts in history. On April 15, 1986, the U.S. bombed the Libyan capital, killing up to 100 civilians. At the time, the White House said the strikes hit only important military facilities, but bombs also fell on a densely populated suburb and Qaddafi's residential compound, killing his adopted baby daughter. UPDATE: Qadaffi has been killed, presumably by rebel fighters. Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah of Lebanon (miss) Washington Post/Getty Images A 440-lb car bomb in 1985 killed everything in its path—except its target, alleged Hezbollah leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. The sheikh was not at his Beirut home, but many others died in a nearby seven-story apartment building and adjacent cinema that were destroyed in the blast. The bomb was allegedly set by a former Lebanese warlord, but funded by the Saudis and approved by CIA director William Casey, according to veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward. Sandinista Leadership (miss) Time Life Pictures/Getty Image In the 1980s, failed assassination plots against Daniel Ortega and other democratically elected, left-leaning Sandinista leaders, were only the third most controversial aspect of the CIA's involvement in Nicaragua. The agency was also helping to sell illegal arms to Iran (the same Iran the U.S. is now trying to dis-arm), secretly using the proceeds to illegally fund the Contras' struggle against the Sandinistas, and distributing a "Freedom Fighter's Manual" with tips and directions for assassination, torture, blackmail and more. Time magazine and other sources reported on the manual, which was scanned and is available online. Osama bin Laden (miss) Getty Images The CIA trained and armed Osama bin Laden and many of his future al Qaeda terrorists in their war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Today, many of the same CIA classmates are on a list of approved assassination targets. Although the CIA has been hunting for Osama since at least 1998, they've been famously unsuccessful. When it was discovered that U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki had been added to the current CIA hit list, two civil-liberties groups sued the federal government for illegally targeting an American citizen. UPDATE: bin Laden has been killed by Seal Team Six of the American Navy.
WHEN Vladimir Putin plays host to Barack Obama and other world leaders at the G20 summit in St Petersburg next week, mutual resentment and dislike will be ill-concealed. The American president recently likened the Russian leader’s body language to that of a “bored kid in the back of the classroom” . Mr Obama has cancelled a planned bilateral meeting in Moscow, choosing to visit Sweden instead. The last straw was Russia’s sheltering of Edward Snowden, a fugitive American spook. But the spat over that only crystallised something apparent since Mr Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012: that the “reset”, launched with much fanfare in 2009, is not just dying, but dead. http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21584339-relations-europe-and-america-freeze-over-vladimir-putin-looks-china-cold-climate
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