Yeah - what I meant is that if there was no corresponding capital gains hike, then the uber-rich would hardly even notice, since that's what most of their income tends to be.

Was it a personal income tax, or a capital gains tax?

I suspect the latter, which would explain why the very richest were not actually bothered all that much.

Yes, direct. So are all people that I know. I don't think you can be a blue badge otherwise.

The original capture report listed two Buks, according to Ukrainians.

I've no doubt that Russia supplies arms to the rebels, but the source of this particular AA remains unclear, and could be either. Now that it has been hastily removed from the scene, and probably destroyed, I doubt we will ever find out.

Read these links in order, paying close attention to the dates of each article (use Google/Bing/Yandex Translate if you don't know Russian, it's good enough to understand the meaning). They pretty much answer all the questions: who did it, what they did it with etc. Note that ITAR TASS is the Russian official state media, so while it is obviously propaganda, in this case it only gives credence to the claims, since the result is strikingly not in their favor:

http://itar-tass.com/mezhdunar...
http://itar-tass.com/mezhdunar...
http://www.vz.ru/news/2014/7/1...
http://itar-tass.com/mezhdunar...
http://itar-tass.com/mezhdunar...

There are many other gas suppliers in the region - Azerbaijan is the most obvious one, but then there's Turkmenistan, and hell, why not, even Iran. The trick is building new pipelines such that they don't end up on Russian territory. But that is already in progress.

It's actually a really funny way to word it, because if you ask the rebels, it's not the territory of Ukraine. It's the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic (or is it Novorossiya Federation now?).

It now seems from the reports that they were running the system without the radar installation that it is supposed to be paired with in order to detect targets, and using only the smaller radar on the launcher itself that's only meant to be used for missile guidance. I don't know what the full implications of that are, but I strongly suspect that the smaller radar does not have any means of proper target identification, so they were probably just spotting them visually. A passenger jet flying at 10km would have a silhouette pretty similar to An-26 flying at 5km (which is where the last one that they have downed was flying at).

I just don't see any reason at all for them to knowingly target a passenger plane. There's no military value in it, and, on the other hand, it's a PR nightmare for them, and might actually prompt Europe to enact tighter sanctions, and for US to start giving direct military aid.

The sad story of the Odessa fire is that the people who were actually responsible for earlier violence have all got away - they either didn't retreat to that building in the first place, or quickly vacated through the back windows when they saw the fire. The ones who burned or choked to death in the building were anti-Maidan sympathizers, but none of them were of the violent kind (at least, there's no evidence implicating any of them).

It's "the USA", because the long form is "the United States of America". "The" here attaches to the "states", not to the entire name of the country.

Similarly, in "the UK", "the" is attached to the "kingdom"; and in "the USSR", it's "the union".

The Netherlands is a bit less obvious because people don't usually know the full name of the country. It's "The Kingdom of the Netherlands", and "the Netherlands" is just a geographic region - it literally means "the low lands", for obvious reasons.

In case of Ukraine, it's a bit trickier. The etymology of the word itself is from Old East Slavic "oukraina", which literally means "area at the edge" ("ou" - "at", "krai" - "edge"). When applied to geographic places and countries, it's the same as English "march", German "mark", or Polish "kresy" - i.e. "borderland", a region of some larger territory that is on the frontier. Which, of course, is what Ukraine was for Muscovite Rus - the borderlands with Poles, Ottomans, Crimean Tatars, and numerous small raiding steppe tribes; a place where life is harsh and violent, but there's no rigid state hierarchy;a place where criminals, runaway serfs, and anyone else who wanted to escape the oppression in Muscovy or Poland-Lithuania would go to join cossacks, because "there's no extradition from Don", as cossacks themselves put it.

Now, if you use it literally, as a descriptive term, then in English you'd put the "the" there - a literal translation of Russian "okraina Rossii" would be "the borderlands of Russia". So saying "the Ukraine" is basically saying that the country is the borderlands (by implication, of some other country). When you drop the "the", you are basically dropping the etymological baggage, and accepting the name as a proper name in its own right.

Depending on the language, this same distinction can manifest itself differently. For example, Russian doesn't have articles, but it has two different prepositions, "v" and "na" (roughly equivalent to "in" and "on" in English). The equivalent of saying "in the Ukraine" in Russian is "na Ukraine", and the equivalent of saying "in Ukraine" (without the "the") is "v Ukraine". Similarly to English, the "the"-equivalent form has been the literary standard for several centuries now, and is commonly used, but Ukrainians don't like it and prefer that the other form is used. This often results in lengthy flamewars on forums, Wikipedia etc.

Most of the rebels there are people who served in the Soviet military (most as conscripts, some as volunteers) years ago - some of them might have served on this very thing.

More likely is that it's some of the people with past combat experience. A lot of volunteers coming from Russia are veterans of Afghan and Chechen wars.

What is the video of Buk crossing the border from Russia? The one video that I'm aware of that predates the attack shows a Buk driving around somewhere close to the area where the plane was shot down; it's not the border.

Also, the rebels themselves boasted of capturing two Buks from an Ukrainian military base that they took over recently. Ukrainian side has confirmed that the base was taken over, and that it had Buks in it, though they dismissed the threat saying that those Buks are "deactivated" and "inoperable". But then again, three days before the attack, Sergey Kurginyan, one of the rebel sympathizers, have mentioned the Buk in a lengthy video and claimed that they have "genius technicians" that have already got the thing running.

So it seems that the rebels "borrowed" the launcher from Ukrainians, but Russia is now aiding them in trying to hide it to block the investigation.

Did you see the diagram in TFA that Verizon itself presented to explain the issue? It directly contradicts what you wrote.

The other option is that they did indeed have the crew (maybe defectors, but more likely volunteers or mercs from Russia who used this system in the past), but they didn't have the proper radar station so the autonomous mode is all they had, and is what they used. I'd expect that this radar is much more limited in its target identification capabilities if its primary use is to track the target that's already designated. If so, they could be eyeballing the targets to pick them, and then feeding them to the radar. This would explain how they ended up targeting the jet - at this height, its silhouette would look a lot like An-26 flying at the height that's normal for it.

It's still not the only answer. How many Ukrainian citizens there are among the separatists is a hotly contested topic. Most certainly, the top of their hierarchy seems to consist mostly of foreigners - Borodai, Strelkov etc are all Russian citizens, not Ukrainian ones. The actual rank and file does have both locals and volunteers/mercs from Russia, but, again, the proportions are not clear at all.