KIEV (Reuters) - About 30 Ukrainian servicemen were wounded in fighting with pro-Russian separatists near Ukraine's eastern border with Russia early on Tuesday, the border guard service said.

It said separatist fighters had fired mortar bombs on government forces and border guards during the night near the city of Luhansk. It gave no details of any casualties among the rebels, who oppose central rule by Kiev's pro-Western leaders.

The separatists say government forces have been shelling their positions this week, including around the city of Slaviansk, scene of some of the heaviest fighting since the uprising began in the Russian-speaking east in April.

President Petro Poroshenko has ordered government forces to retake control of the border from the rebels after Kiev and the United States accused Russia of sending fighters and weapons, including tanks, across the frontier. Moscow denies this.

Poroshenko said on Monday that government forces had already re-established control of a more than 250-km (156-mile) stretch of the almost 2,000-km (1,240-mile) land border with Russia.

Kiev says 125 Ukrainian serviceman have been killed since the start of a military operation to defeat the separatists in May. Scores of separatist fighters have also been killed in fighting, as well as an unknown number of civilians.

The crisis in Ukraine erupted late last year when protesters took to the streets against a president sympathetic to Moscow. He was overthrown in February, Russia annexed the Crimea region in March and the uprising in the east began in April.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Ukraine fighting threatens water supply to four million: OSCE

KIEV (Reuters) - Fighting in eastern Ukraine threatens water supplies to the city of Donetsk and could have serious consequences for 4 million people, monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Monday.

The OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission in eastern Ukraine quoted local officials as saying a water pumping station and a section of pipeline near the town of Semyonovka, close to the bitterly contested city of Slaviansk, had been damaged in fighting between government forces and separatists.

"This pumping station and pipeline constitute the main water supply for Donetsk city's population of 1 million, and a further 3 million inhabitants of the region," it said in a statement following talks with Donetsk mayor Alexander Lukyanchenko.

The OSCE mission quoted the mayor on its Facebook page as saying that the water supply to Donetsk had not been affected yet, but that this was set to change "in a very short while".

Repair work was under way but help was needed to prevent it being interrupted by shooting, it said.

Semyonovka lies about 5 km (3 miles) southeast of Slaviansk and 110 km (70 miles) north of Donetsk, the main city in the Donbass coal mining region.

The statement is the latest sign of a growing humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine.

Water, food and electricity supplies have been affected in some areas and thousands of people have fled their homes for safe areas, including some who have taken refuge in Russia.

The separatists rose up in the Russian-speaking east in April to press for annexation by Moscow after Ukraine's pro-Russian president was toppled in February and Russia annexed the Crimea region from Ukraine in March.

(Reporting by Timothy Heritage; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Water at risk for 4 million in Ukraine: OSCE

Fighting in eastern Ukraine has damaged pumping equipment and could have a wide-ranging effect.
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John Kerry: Airstrikes are on the table in Iraq

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BAGHDAD (AP) — Sunni insurgents pushed further into a province northeast of Baghdad, laid siege to a police station and battled pro-government Shiite militiamen in overnight clashes that left at least 44 detainees dead, Iraqi officials said Tuesday.

There were conflicting reports on details of the fighting in the al-Kattoun district near Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province.

Three police officers said the police station, which has a small jail, came under attack on Monday night by Islamic militants who tried to free the detainees, all suspected Sunni militants.

The three said Shiite militiamen, who rushed to defend the facility, killed the detainees at close range. A morgue official in the provincial capital of Baqouba said many of the slain detainees had bullet wounds to the head and chest. All four officials spoke on condition of anonymity fearing for their own safety.

However, Iraq's chief military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi told The Associated Press that 52 detainees who were held at the station in al-Kattoun died when the attackers shelled it with mortar rounds.

Al-Moussawi said the attackers belonged to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida-inspired group that last week captured a large swath of territory in a lightning offensive in northern Iraq.

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Shiite tribal fighters raise their weapons and chant slogans against the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic S …

The group is known to be active in Diyala, where Shiite militiamen are deployed alongside government forces.

Nine of the attackers were killed, said al-Moussawi. The conflicting reports could not immediately be reconciled.

The Islamic State has vowed to march to Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf in the worst threat to Iraq's stability since U.S. troops left in 2011. Their push has largely been unchecked as Iraqi troops and police melted away and surrendered in the militants' onslaught on the city of Mosul and Trikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown.

But a call to arms on Friday from Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, raised the specter that the turmoil in Iraq is quickly evolving into a Sunni-Shiite conflict.

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Japan approves ‘ice wall’ around leaking Fukushima power plant

The operator of Japan's battered Fukushima nuclear power plant said Tuesday it was having trouble with the early stages of an ice wall being built under broken reactors to contain radioactive water.

Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) has begun digging the trenches for a huge network of pipes pipes under the plant through which it intends to pass refrigerant.

This will freeze the soil and form a physical barrier that is intended to prevent clean groundwater flowing down mountainsides from mixing with contaminated water underneath the leaking reactors.

TEPCO said Tuesday a smaller, inner ice wall whose pipes it sank earlier to contain the already-contaminated water was proving difficult.

"We have yet to form the ice stopper because we can't make the temperature low enough to freeze water," a TEPCO spokesman said.

"We are behind schedule but have already taken additional measures, including putting in more pipes, so that we can remove contaminated water from the trench starting next month."

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In this photo provided by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), underground water is being released into …

The coolant being used in the operation is an aqueous solution of calcium chloride, which is cooled to -30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit).

The idea of freezing a section of the ground, which was proposed for Fukushima last year, has previously been used in the construction of tunnels near watercourses.

However, scientists point out that it has not been done on this scale before nor for the proposed length of time.

Coping with the huge -- and growing -- amount of water at the tsunami-damaged plant is proving to be one of the biggest challenges for TEPCO, as it tries to clean up the mess after the worst nuclear disaster in a generation, in which three reactors went into meltdown.

As well as all the water used to keep broken reactors cool, the utility must also deal with water that makes its way along subterranean watercourses from mountainsides to the sea.

Full decommissioning of the plant at Fukushima is expected to take several decades. An area around the plant remains out of bounds, and experts warn that some settlements may have to be abandoned because of high levels of radiation.

The Heritage Foundation hosted a Benghazi panel on Monday that took a turn for the worse when a Muslim law student asked the panel a question about their portrayal of Islam as universally bad. Their answers, detailed in Dana Milbank's Washington Postcolumn, quickly turned introduced a comparison to Nazi Germany.

As Milbank notes, the panelists' intense, angry response to a question from the "soft-spoken" student — along with the standing ovation it triggered from the crowd — was something of an "unexpected turn" to the panel. However, it is perhaps not so surprising when you know that two of the Foundation's panelists were Brigitte Gabriel of ACT! for America, and Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. Gabriel is a prominent anti-Sharia activist who is a regular commentator on Fox News. Gaffney is one of the architects of a conservative approach to national security that advocates for the profiling and surveillance of Muslim Americans.

Here's a video of the relevant segment, lifted from Heritage's livestream of the panel (via Media Matters):

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Gaffney himself often takes a soft tone when responding to accusations that his ideas are bigoted or dangerous. In the video, he speaks first after American University law student Saba Ahmed asks the panel to address "how can we fight an ideological war with weapons," and questioned the panel's portrayal of Islam as inherently bad. Gaffney, as he often does, makes a distinction between "moderate" and "bad" Muslims. However, his argument includes the implication that the "moderate" Muslims would become radicalized if they were simply more devout to their own religion. In other words, it's a complicated and subtle response, but it still does the thing that Ahmed's question criticizes: Gaffney's approach to combating terrorism involves the assumption that any follower of Islam is uniquely suspect.

Then, it was Brigitte Gabriel's turn. She claimed that of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, 180-to-300 million are "dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization," even though "of course" most Muslims are not radical. But then she added that the "peaceful majority were irrelevant" because, for instance, 19 Muslims were responsible for September 11th. Gabriel went on to compare "peaceful" Muslims to Germans during the Nazi regime, saying that “most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million died.” To suggest otherwise, she later added, was "political correctness" that should be "thrown in the garbage."

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We'll let Milbank give his (somewhat dramatic) account of the exchange:

“Are you an American?” Gabriel demanded of Ahmed, after accusing her of taking “the limelight” and before informing her that her “political correctness” belongs “in the garbage.”

“Where are the others speaking out?” Ahmed was asked. This drew an extended standing ovation from the nearly 150 people in the room, complete with cheers.

The panel’s moderator, conservative radio host Chris Plante, grinned and joined in the assault. “Can you tell me who the head of the Muslim peace movement is?” he demanded of Ahmed.

“Yeah,” audience members taunted, “yeah.”

Ahmed answered quietly, as before. “I guess it’s me right now,” she said.

The panel was part of a series of discussions on Benghazi, co-run by the Heritage Foundation and the Benghazi Accountability Coalition, run by Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy, who now writes for the National Review, has collaborated in the past with Gaffney on anti-Sharia policy documents.

This post has been updated

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/06/video-benghazi-panel-turns-ugly-after-muslim-woman-asks-about-peaceful-muslims/372920/