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Any kind of air strikes or something are extremely unlikely, I'd say, as getting involved in a military conflict near Russia is very high on the "things not to do" list. Not as high as getting into a war with Russia, but still.

What will happen is an investigation and if they can determine who was responsible there might be international warrants and if someone can get arrested, a trial. This will largely depend on the cooperation of the rebels though, who control the crash site and have the black box. It will also depend on Russian cooperation.

If (and that is a big IF) it could somehow be proven that Russian weapons were used in this or that Russia is in some way responsible, that might lead to stronger sanctions (there are already people calling for that), but not much more.
On the other hand I can imagine that Putin might consider dropping support for the rebels, if they bring him trouble like that.

It doesn't make any sense. If the rebels did it, they would risk angering NATO. If the Ukrainian government did it, they would lose the support of NATO. Both parties have the capabilities to do it, but neither would gain from it. I think that it was a case of mistaken identity-somebody thought that they saw a hostile aircraft, and instead shot down an airliner.

That is the way it looks like right now, the rebels mistook the plane for an Ukrainian plane. Even if it was just incompetence, that is still pretty bad.

I've never really been able to take the PLO at face value either, because they historically seem to have no control over Hamas, or like Sinn Fein and the IRA of old, the political wing is still ultimately a legitimacy cover for the militant wing and not an independent force for peace. And even if they were, the PLO would basically have to disarm Hamas for any hope of real cessation to hostilities. And even if they did, there'd still be 'cowboys', to use an American term, firing rockets independent of any organization, or other organizations moving in to take up where Hamas left off, and Israel would do what it normally does: retaliate back. It is nearly impossible to break the cycle of violence because both sides are so willing to perpetuate it.

Actually it's a bit different, Hamas are religious fanatics, PLO is more nationalist and used to be alligned with various socialist groups in Europe. Fatah is the strongest faction within PLO, that currently governs the West Bank. Hamas and Fatah used to fight, and Hamas violently kicked Fatah out of Gaza. Now Fatah was supposed to assume government in Gaza again, but Hamas didn't let them.
Hamas is basically the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (the last truce was negotiated by now deposed Egyptian President Mursi, of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood). The Hamas is not the military arm of PLO, but they are different organisations fighting each other.

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- in June rebels took over Ukrainian military base A-1402, where there was a Buk (can shoot 18km high) and a mobile radar system type Kupol (can locate targets with 160km radius). So technically speaking they are equipped to shoot down such a plane.

That is rebels' claim. Our side denies that.
Separatists are known to say  "we captured new equipment from Ukraine" every time when new "toys" delivered from Russia

Well, the point is, now they claim they can only shoot things in 4km height, when in late June they bragged about this equipment.
So no matter where the equipment came from (maybe your government didn't want to admit the loss, maybe it came from somewhere else), the rebels are making contradictory statements about what equipment they have, so that makes it look like they are lying now.

Quote from: XXSockXX on July 17, 2014, 08:54:45 am

Well, meatshields or not, you cannot have a war without innocent civilian casualties, period. That's why war is shit. Even without human error, you can't build a precision rocket that only hits the enemy soldiers/structures but leaves the civilian next to them uninjured, even if some US media were almost pretending that might work back in the last Iraq war.

I dunno, they appeared to hit that group of fleeing children pretty accurately.  Maybe the claims about the precision of their weapons are true.

I don't know why you assume they would do that on purpose. There are things like human error, ask the German officer who ordered an air strike on a fuel truck that killed over a hundred (IIRC) innocent people in Afghanistan. Of course prolonged warfare breeds hatred, cruelty and war crimes, but I don't think we have to assume this is always the case, particularly here where the Israeli army is very aware that they can't look like they're targeting civilians on purpose.

But more generally I think the rhetoric surrounding Hamas is absurd.  Yeah, it's a violent separatist group.  Yeah, it targets civilians.  This is not a new thing.  Separatist groups in Europe such as the IRA and ETA have used similar tactics, and their actions were not used to justify the mass slaughter of civilians by the government in response (well ok that did happen in some cases, but that invariably made the situation worse).  Indeed, those groups ended up crumbling away to nothing after their legitimate complaints were addressed, too.

Hamas is not a separatist group. The situations don't compare. IRA and ETA didn't have a base they ruled, with civilians they could use as meatshields, and they didn't have the resources for a full out war. And as to legitimate claims, Hamas denies Israel's right to existence, it's not like they would be content with just an independent Palestine.
Maybe you could have a compromise solution with PLO, but not with Hamas.

When are we going to close the poll and move onto the next questions?

When there are 99% for independence. 

I actually enjoy discussing politics with people I disagree with sometimes, at least if they are being somewhat intelligent about it. It can be enlightening as to how other people think and it helps you understand political ideas and movements you'd find strange otherwise.

Did anyone hear about a big protest against the living conditions in the emirates?

Protests concerning the Middle East will involve Israel quite often. Obvious exceptions were protests during the Iraq war and protests against the war in Afghanistan or protests about Turkish internal affairs, ie the Kurdish-Turkish conflict. I don't think there were comparatively big protests against Assad or Gaddafi or Saddam. The mistreatment of workers in the Emirates is an issue you hear about a lot, but I haven't heard anything about protests.
The protests that involve lots of non-Muslim are usually the ones that paint the US (and Israel) as warmongerers while they have little to say about the Islamic regimes (or about Russia for that matter). I think a lot of these people genuinely don't mean to be anti-semitic or don't think they are, but they definitely have a very unhealthy one-sided obsession with Israel to say the least, that goes back to the 60s when the German far-left supported PLO (which they saw as a socialist revolutionary movement).
There is this jewish-german journalist, Henryk M. Broder, who writes a lot about this kind of left-wing antisemitism, mostly in German, but maybe you can find something in English too.

Why would a poll six weeks before the referendum be any more accurate than a poll two weeks later?

Not more accurate maybe, but safer. Hoping that enough people change their minds in the last four weeks is a shaky prospect. I guess last minute decisions are going to be less likely than in a regular election, because this is too important. You'll have to fight a lot in the next six weeks to be able to win this.