A contentious proposal to expand background checks on Washington state gun sales failed Tuesday in the state House, where supporters said they were just a handful of votes short.

In a final effort to pick up a few extra votes, Rep. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, had proposed a referendum clause that would have allowed the public to vote on the measure. He initially believed that would draw enough support to corral the 50 votes needed to pass the bill but conceded Tuesday night that others had dropped their backing because of that shift.

"It was too big of a stretch for this year," Pedersen said.

Pedersen said he was disappointed by the result, and several Democrats departing for the night were emotional about the collapse of a bill they'd spent two days intensely working to finalize. The week had included lobbying from former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Democrat who was wounded in a January 2011 mass shooting, and Gov. Jay Inslee.

At least 116,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,800 coalition troops died in Iraq between the outbreak of war in 2003 and the US withdrawal in 2011, researchers estimate.

Its involvement in Iraq has so far cost the United States $810 billion (625 billion euros) and could eventually reach $3 trillion, they added.

The estimates come from two US professors of public health, reporting on Friday in the British peer-reviewed journal The Lancet.

They base the figures on published studies in journals and on reports by government agencies, international organisations and the news media.

"We conclude that at least 116,903 Iraqi non-combatants and more than 4,800 coalition military personnel died over the eight-year course" of the war from 2003 to 2011, they said.

"Many Iraqi civilians were injured or became ill because of damage to the health-supporting infrastructure of the country, and about five million were displaced.

Reacting to Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) blunt reply to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on gun control, Republican pundit and author Ann Coulter exclaimed on Thursday night that the whole conversation makes her think "liberal women should not be able to hold office" in the United States.

She explained that her shocking notion springs from her prior belief that women should not be allowed to vote, mainly because "as soon as they get a question they don't like, they start crying." She then compared Feinstein, one of the longest-serving Democrats in the Senate, to a college student failing to answer a question by a professor.

"He's absolutely right, he nailed her, so she said I'm offended," Coulter said. "I used to think women just shouldn't be able to vote. Now I think at least liberal women should not be able to hold office, and by woman I do not mean to limit that to the biological sense. That is not an answer, I'm offended."

An FBI agent in a supervisory position on the East Coast of the U.S. told The Daily Caller Thursday that he is aware of investigative reports sent from the bureau to the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami, Florida, in connection with a grand jury investigation into New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez.

A second law-enforcement source, a recently retired FBI agent, also confirmed the investigation and the grand jury.

The Washington Post reported Thursday evening that multiple sources confirmed the grand jury's existence, and said it was focused on his relationship with Dr. Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida donor whose relationship with the Democratic lawmaker has been at the center of several allegations of serious ethics lapses.

The senator has acknowledged Melgen provided him with free air travel to the Dominican Republic aboard his private jet on three occasions in 2010. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee reimbursed Melgen for one of those trips. Menendez himself wrote a $58,500 check for the other two in January 2013, nearly three years after the travel occurred.

US drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal districts are carried out without the consent of the government in Islamabad and are a violation of its sovereignty, a UN official has warned.

Returning from a three-day visit to the country's capital, Ben Emmerson QC, the UN's special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, said he had been given assurances that there was no "tacit consent by Pakistan to the use of drones on its territory".

His comments on Friday are a direct response to widespread suspicions that some parts of Pakistan's military or intelligence organisations have been providing clandestine authorisation to Washington for attacks by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on Taliban or al-Qaida suspects in provinces on the Afghan border.

Emmerson said he had been told that "a thorough search of Pakistani government records had revealed no indication of such consent having been given".

His statement said that Pakistan's foreign affairs ministry had confirmed "that since mid-2010 (and to date) it has regularly sent 'notes verbales' to the US embassy in Islamabad protesting the use of drones on the territory of Pakistan" and "requiring the US to cease these strikes immediately".

Young men who have served in the British military are about three times more likely than civilians to have committed a violent offense, researchers reported Friday in a study that explores the roots of such behavior.

The research found that merely being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan made no difference in rates of violent crime later on. Instead, a key predictor was violent behavior before enlisting. Combat duty also raised the risk, as did witnessing traumatic events during deployment or misusing alcohol afterward.

Still, the vast majority - 94 percent - of British military staff who return home after serving in a combat zone don't commit any crimes, researchers told reporters at a briefing.

The study found little difference in the lifetime rates of violent offenses between military personnel and civilian populations at age 46 - 11 percent versus almost 9 percent. Among younger men, however, being in the military seemed to make a difference: Nearly 21 percent of the military group under age 30 had a conviction for a violent offense in their lifetime compared to fewer than 7 percent of similarly aged men in the general population, according to British crime statistics.

While already giving intelligence services access to private data without a court order, some Russian experts say, Skype is still being pressured into registering as a telecom agency, allowing intelligence to operate around a series of legal loopholes.

Intelligence services have for years have been monitoring Skype communications, several participants in the Russian information security industry have told Russian newspaper Vedomosti. According to security experts, access to correspondence and Skype conversations within the Russian intelligence community does not always go through the court system - it is often obtained on a "simple request."

After Microsoft acquired Skype in May 2011, it updated its software with a technology allowing "legitimate wiretapping," Maksim Emm, CEO of Peak Systems, told the publication. Since then, any user account can be switched to a special mode in which the encryption keys that were previously generated on a user's mobile device or computer would be generated on Skype's server.

More than half of Britons believe Tony Blair was wrong to invade Iraq, while 22% tell YouGov he should be tried as a war criminal

More than half the British public believe the decision to invade Iraq was wrong and more than a fifth believe Tony Blair should be tried as a war criminal, according to a poll conducted to mark the 10th anniversary of the conflict.

A majority (56%) of the public believe the war has increased the risk of a terrorist attack on Britain. More than half, (53%), of those questioned think the invasion was wrong, while just over a quarter (27%) think it was right, according to the YouGov survey.

The poll registered a marked gender differences, with almost a third (32%) of men approving the invasion compared with less than a quarter (23%) of women.

Fifty years after the supreme court ordered states to provide legal counsel to all, Americans still only get the justice they can afford

With an historic vote in the state senate for repeal of that state's death penalty statute, Maryland is on track to become the 18th US state to abolish capital punishment. As much as such repeals are worth celebrating, though, they reform just one aspect of a criminal justice system in which poor defendants are provided shoddy, substandard legal representation, if any at all, and innocent people are convicted and imprisoned and, on occasion, may even have been executed.

Coincidentally, 18 March marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark US supreme court decision in Gideon v Wainwright, which ruled that states under the 14th amendment must provide counsel to criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer. The right to counsel already existed in federal criminal prosecutions under the sixth amendment, but the supreme court forcefully reiterated that.

Sadly, five decades after Gideon, most courts ignore the constitutional right to counsel by inadequately funding equal representation (pdf) for the indigent. In many cases, this right exists only on paper, as there is no public will or interest on the part of government to provide competent lawyers to poor people. Many courts administer cases quickly and with all the thoughtfulness and deliberation of a fast-food restaurant. What we have then is "McJustice", as one Minnesota judge described it.

Even a well-educated layperson charged with a crime knows little or nothing about the law, and "requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him", the supreme court concluded in Gideon. After all, what if the defendant is not properly charged, or the evidence is insufficient for a conviction? The average person lacks the proper knowledge and training to defend himself or herself. The court realized that there can be no equality before the law if the poor have no lawyers; what results is that justice is meted out on the basis of one's personal wealth.

Even the most loyal establishment Democrats are now harshly denouncing the president for his war on transparency

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his pledges of openness and transparency were not ancillary to his campaign but central to it. He repeatedly denounced the Bush administration as "one of the most secretive administrations in our nation's history", saying that "it is no coincidence" that such a secrecy-obsessed presidency "has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to the sunlight." He vowed: "as president, I'm going to change that." In a widely heralded 2007 speech on transparency, he actually claimed that this value shaped his life purpose:

"The American people want to trust in our government again - we just need a government that will trust in us. And making government accountable to the people isn't just a cause of this campaign - it's been a cause of my life for two decades."

His campaign specifically vowed to protect whistleblowers, hailing them as "the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government" and saying that "such acts of courage and patriotism. . . should be encouraged rather than stifled." Transparency groups were completely mesmerized by these ringing commitments. "We have a president-elect that really gets it," gushed Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, in late 2008; "the openness community will expect a complete repudiation of the Ashcroft doctrine." Here's just one of countless representative examples of Obama bashing Bush for excessive secrecy - including in the realm of national security and intelligence - and vowing a fundamentally different course: