Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg's lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott's grandmother, Alma Holland White.

White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants' neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams' farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.

When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White's grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ''It just felt like the right thing to do,'' he says today. ''I felt a connection to those folks.''

The connection was not obvious at their first meeting. About a week after his phone call, Tennant drove from Parkersburg with his wife to Taft's headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firm's glassed-in reception area on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of one of Taft's founders. Tennant — burly and nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap — did not resemble a typical Taft client. ''He didn't show up at our offices looking like a bank vice president,'' says Thomas Terp, a partner who was Bilott's supervisor. ''Let's put it that way.''

Cases of discrimination against Muslims in the United States are on the rise, former New York Supreme Court clerk Tahanie Aboushi told Sputnik.

Aboushi, now a practicing attorney, represents four Americans of various ethnicities who claim to have been the target of bias by the airline carrier American Airlines.

"I think they do happen on a regular basis," Aboushi said on Tuesday. "More frequently than one would think and it has decreased due to the political climate and the discussions that take place concerning the Middle East and Muslims."

According to a number of top U.S. psychologists, like Harvard professor and researcher Howard Gardener, Donald Trump is a "textbook" narcissist. In fact, he fits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George Simon told Vanity Fair, "He's so classic that I'm archiving video clips of him to use in workshops." This puts Trump in the same category as a number of infamous dictators like Muammar Gaddafi, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Saddam Hussein. And although there are narcissists out there who entertain us, innovate, or create great art, when a narcissist is given immense power over people's lives, they can behave much differently. As the 2016 presidential election grows nearer we must ask ourselves, if elected president would Donald Trump act on the behalf of the will of the people, or would he behave more like a dictator—silencing any dissenting voices, perpetually refusing to compromise, and being oppressive to certain groups? To answer that, we should ask a little bit more about what makes a narcissist tick, and how they tend to behave when given free rein.

What is it exactly that makes someone a certifiable narcissist and not simply a person who has a healthy amount of confidence and a burning desire to achieve great goals? According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder is "a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others."

The lifting of sanctions is an unequivocal victory for Iran, sealing its regional position, and leaving its nuclear capability intact

Confirmation that international sanctions on Iran have at last been lifted is unequivocally a victory for Iran. The sanctions should never have been imposed in the first place. Said in April last year in an article I wrote for Sputnik, the evidence suggests Iran did indeed once have a nuclear weapons programme. That programme was not however intended as a threat to the US or Israel or - needless to say - the EU. The Iranian leadership is fully aware that a nuclear weapons programme targeting those countries is far more likely to provoke an attack on Iran than to deter one, and that Iran might not survive such an attack.

Rather Iran's nuclear programme was intended to deter a nuclear attack from Iran's main regional rival - Saddam Hussein's Iraq - which is known to have had a nuclear weapons programme in the decade preceding the 1991 Gulf War. Having fought a bitter war against Saddam Hussein between 1980 and 1988, Iran could not afford to let him acquire nuclear weapons whilst being itself disarmed. It is entirely understandable therefore that the Iranian leadership sought to counter Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programme with a nuclear weapons programme of their own.

All the evidence however points to the Iranian nuclear weapons programme being significantly downgraded in the decade following Saddam Hussein's defeat in 1991, and then having been abandoned completely following his overthrow in 2003. Not only is that the conclusion all the evidence points to, but it is also the opinion of the US intelligence community, which in 2007 publicly confirmed that Iran was no longer pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.

Facing the gleaming Doha skyline on a Persian Gulf winter carries the merit of a panoramic perspective. Most nations around it are going into melt down and the remaining ones - with the exception of Iran - exhibit neither the political leadership nor the economic and institutional infrastructure to do anything other than to meekly accept whatever tsunami hits their shores. They are nothing but scared spectators.

The Empire of Chaos has enough warmongering hardware pre-positioned within spitting distance to turn the whole of Southwest Asia into ashes - as a gaggle of usual suspects in the Beltway, neocon or neoliberalcon, still can't find a cure to their itching to "really win the next war" in a sort of exponential Shock and Awe.

In his latest column for The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan slammed hawks complaining that Washington had 'given away the store' in the Iran nuclear deal. Tehran, he notes, negotiated in good faith, showed that they weren't lying about their weapons program, and proved that they don't want a suicidal war with the US or its regional allies.

The more radically-minded elements of Iran's leadership may very well be grumbling about the Iranian nuclear deal, Buchanan suggests. "For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei] agreed to."

"Last week, he gave his blessing to the return of 10 US sailors who intruded into Iranian waters within hours of capture. He turned loose four Americans convicted of spying." Moreover, "ordered by the US and [the UN] Security Council to prove Iran was not lying when it said it had no nuclear weapons program - an assertion supported by 16 US intelligence agencies 'with high confidence' in 2007 - the Ayatollah had to submit to the following demands:"

The federal criminal investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's failure to secure state secrets was ratcheted up earlier this week, and at the same time, the existence of a parallel criminal investigation of another aspect of her behavior was made known. This is the second publicly revealed expansion of the FBI's investigations in two months.

I have argued for two months that Clinton's legal woes are either grave or worse than grave. That argument has been based on the hard, now public evidence of her failure to safeguard national security secrets and the known manner in which the Department of Justice addresses these failures.

The failure to safeguard state secrets is an area of the law in which the federal government has been aggressive to the point of being merciless. State secrets are the product of members of the intelligence community's risking their lives to obtain information.

International Military Review - Syria, Jan.19, 2016

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and popular forces continued to push the militant groups back from more territories in the Northern parts of the Lattakia province liberating the villages of Ra'as al-Qazal and Ra'as al-Kabir. Also, the militant groups have been pushed to withdrew their forces from the villages of al-Skriyeh,al-Kandisiyeh and Jabal al-Khanadiq.

Tens of al-Nusra members were killed and wounded in the army's missile and rocket attacks on their concentration centers in Hawash al-Ash'ari region and the town of al-Nashabiyeh in Eastern Ghouta. The Syrian government forces are conducting military operations in Darayya in Western Ghouta. Separately, the Syrian warplanes bombed the militant groups' bases and defensive positions in Jobar.

A prominent Saudi media activist revealed that Crown Prince and Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef has held secret talks with the country's tribal leaders to heighten internal conflicts and prevent empowerment of Mohammed bin Salman.

"After news reports said that the Saudi king has decided to leave the power to his son, the Saudi crown prince has held some meetings with the tribal leaders to destabilize domestic conditions in Saudi Arabia," the activist who called for anonymity for security reasons told FNA on Tuesday.

Noting that the details of these meetings are not known, he said it seems that Mohammed bin Nayef sees himself entitled to the throne, and he, thus, seeks to spark internal problems and insecurity with the help of certain tribes to stir crisis and prevent the deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman from ascending to the throne.

The president of the European Council has warned that Europe has "no more than two months" to get the refugee crisis under control, or else its borderless Schengen zone will collapse.

"We have no more than two months to get things under control," Donald Tusk told the European Parliament on Tuesday, adding that the Schengen area would otherwise fail. The 26-nation Schengen zone allows people to travel freely between participating countries, without passport or ID checks.

Tusk also said the EU would "fail as a political project" if the bloc could not exercise proper control of its external borders.

It comes just days after Austria's chancellor, Werner Faymann, announced that the country had "temporarily cancelled" its adherence to the Schengen agreement.

"If the EU does not manage to secure the external borders, Schengen as a whole is put into question...then each country must control its national borders," Faymann told Oesterreich newpaper, adding that if the bloc's external borders are not secured in the near future, "the whole EU [will be] in question."