Anti-Russian Western sanctions have produced little effect on the country's arms trade, the state arms exporter said. Russia imports few arms from Western countries, while traditional markets for Russian weapons export haven't joined the sanctions.

"The sanctions didn't affect our arms markets. They are traditional, and we still have them. The purchases of our arms will not go down," Igor Sevastyanov, deputy head of Rosoboronexport told journalists on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Sevastyanov's boss Anatoly Isaikin said that Rosoboronexport expects arms sales to foreign buyers to remain steady until 2016. Russia sold $13 billion worth of weapons in 2013, with about 37 percent of that in aircraft, 26 percent going to air defense systems, 21 percent to tanks and other army weapons, and 12 percent to naval sales.

The sanctions could affect Russian military cooperation with Europe, but that would have marginal effect, according to Sevastyanov.

"I thought I was losing my capacity to be shocked -- but events in Missouri over just the last couple of hours have crossed a frightening line, one that makes me pray that this assault on fundamental American values is just the aberration of one rudderless Heartland community, and not the first symptoms of nation gone mad with high-tech weaponry to keep its own citizens in line." - Journalist Will Bunch

The difference between what happened in Boston in the wake of the Boston Marathon explosion and what is happening now in Ferguson, Missouri, is not in the government's response but in the community's response.

This is what happens when you ignore the warning signs.

This is what happens when you fail to take alarm at the first experiment on your liberties.

This is what happens when you fail to challenge injustice and government overreach until the prison doors clang shut behind you.

Consider that it was just a little over a year ago that the city of Boston was locked down while police carried out a military-style manhunt for the suspects in the Boston Marathon explosion. At the time, Americans welcomed the city-wide lockdown, the routine invasion of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses.

Fast forward 14 months, and Americans are shocked at the tactics being employed to quell citizen unrest in Ferguson, Missouri - a massive SWAT team, an armored personnel carrier, men in camouflage pointing heavy artillery at the crowd, smoke bombs and tear gas - where residents are outraged and in the streets in response to a recent police shooting of one of their own: a young, unarmed college-bound black teenager who had the misfortune of being in the wrong time at the wrong place.

Here's the problem, though, as I explain in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, in the American police state that now surrounds us, every time and every place is the wrong time and the wrong place, especially if you still believe you have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty by a court of law.

In the American police state, there is no longer such a thing as innocence. We are all potentially guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects waiting to be accused of a crime.

Why is this happening?

By analyzing CIA documents from earlier days, we can understand the programs of the Agency and its government cousins.

Given the fact that the CIA's umbrella research program, MKULTRA, went completely dark in 1962, and given the technological advances that have been made in the intervening years, we can draw inferences about present-day covert ops.

Document: May 20, 1975; sent by CIA Inspector General, Donald F. Chamberlain, to the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby.

Subject: CIA activities at Fort Detrick, Maryland [in the 1952 period].

Fort Detrick was the center of US government chem/bio warfare research.

Here is the opening quote from the document:

"In early 1952, CIA effected an agreement with the Army Chemical Corp for the performance of certain research and development work by the Army Chemical Corp at the laboratory facilities of Special Operations Division, Army Biological Laboratories, Frederick, Maryland."

And here is a key quote about a research project:

"Adaptation and testing of a non-discernible microbioinoculator (device for clandestine inoculation with BW/CW [biowarfare/chemicalwarfare] agents) to determine compatibility with various materials to assure that the microbioinoculator cannot be identified structurally or easily detected upon a detailed autopsy..."

A startling new political science study concludes that corporate interests and mega wealthy individuals control U.S. policy to such a degree that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

The startling study, titled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Politics and was authored by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page. An early draft can be found here.

Noted American University Historian Allan J. Lichtman, who highlighted the piece in a Tuesday article published in The Hill, calls Gilens and Page's research "shattering" and says their scholarship "should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government."

The statistical research looked at public attitudes on nearly 1,800 policy issues and determined that government almost always ignores the opinions of average citizens and adopts the policy preferences of monied business interests when shaping the contours of U.S. laws.

The study's findings align with recent trends, where corporate elites have aggressively pursued pro-amnesty policies despite the fact that, according to the most recent Reuters poll, 70% of Americans believe illegal immigrants "threaten traditional U.S. beliefs and customs," and 63% believe "immigrants place a burden on the economy."

Fresh off a trip to India and Australia, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel addressed a group of Marines in San Diego, California Tuesday, and may have delivered a line that will show up in Republican campaign ads this election cycle. After updating the troops on some issues in the Pacific region and the Middle East, Hagel took questions from some of the Marines and gave a stark assessment of the global security situation: "The world is exploding all over." The remark came in response to a question about the Obama administration's realignment of the military towards the Asia-Pacific theater:

Q: Good afternoon, sir. My question is that, given that the administration's primary focus is on the Pacific theater, how has all of the issues popping up in the world today, Russia, Iraq, Africa, the rest of the theaters pretty much affected that current mission? And how do you foresee that affecting the mission in the future?

SEC. HAGEL: Thank you. That's a -- go ahead, sit down -- that's a question I got often when I was in India and Australia. And the trip I just came from was my sixth trip to the Asia Pacific area in the last year-and-a-half. I've got four planned this calendar year. And so I get that question all the time. It's a legitimate question for the very reasons you asked.

The world is exploding all over. And so is the United States going to continue to have the resources, the capabilities, the leadership, the bandwidth to continue with the rebalance toward the Asia Pacific? And the answer is yes.

Hagel went on say that, despite the rebalancing towards the Pacific, the US will not be "retreating" from any threats elsewhere in the world.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warns that public disclosure of a Senate report on the agency's torture methods will trigger violent street protests in the Middle East, endangering US embassies and personnel.

"The Mideast is a tinderbox right now and this could be the spark that ignites quite a fire," a US intelligence official who was briefed on the findings told Yahoo News.

That concern was echoed Friday by a former top US intelligence official. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if you release a report like this at a time when terrorism is surging all over the Mideast you are handing the other side a recruitment tool," John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director, told Yahoo News. "It's blindingly obvious."

A Russian convoy of 262 trucks packed with humanitarian aid is approaching the Ukrainian border amid fears that it might escalate the already tense situation in the war-ravaged east of the country.

The aid convoy was expected on Wednesday at the volatile Ukraine's border where pro-Russian forces and Ukrainian troops are engaged in fierce battles.

Russian media say some 2,000 tons of aid, from baby food to sleeping bags, was en route to east Ukraine, where some 1,300 people have been killed in fighting between pro-Russians and government forces.

Ukraine, however, on Tuesday pledged to deny entry to the Russian convoy, saying the mission could be a ploy to help pro-Kremlin forces.

"We will not consider the possibility of any movement of the Russian column on the territory of Ukraine," Deputy Head of Ukraine's Presidential Administration Valeriy Chaly said on Tuesday.

In a short speech to government officials in July 2014, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad exposes the truth behind the 'Arab Spring' and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

"Were [the Arab Spring] a call for freedom, democracy, justice, it would have begun in the most oppressive and tyrannical states".

Are Western propagandists fooling anyone but themselves?

The latest absurdity coming out of Ukraine, the EU and Washington is that the humanitarian aid that Russia and the Red Cross are trucking into the former Russian territories that comprise eastern Ukraine is a trick, a deception, a pretext for Russia's invasion forces. Such a preposterous lie tells us that Western propagandists have no respect whatsoever for the intelligence of Western peoples.

Even a moron should understand that if Russia wants to send military forces into Ukraine, Russia doesn't need any pretext, much less a joint humanitarian venture with the Red Cross. The eastern Ukraine, following Crimea's lead, has already voted both independence from Kiev and in favor of rejoining Russia. If Russia needed an excuse, the decisions by the eastern Ukrainians made months ago suffice. But Russia needs no excuse to rescue Russians from being slaughtered by Washington's stooges like Palestinians in Gaza.

Now I know that the Israeli Defence Forces are famous in song and legend. Humanitarian, courageous, self-sacrificing, restrained, willing to give their own lives for the innocents among their enemies, etc, etc.

Leon Uris's Exodus - a racist, fictional account of the birth of Israel in which Arabs are rarely mentioned without the adjectives "dirty" and "stinking" - was one of the best pieces of Socialist-Zionist propaganda that Israel could have sought. Even Ben Gurion agreed, claiming that it was "the greatest thing ever written about Israel", although he correctly dismissed any literary qualities this nonsense might have possessed.

But when the Israeli ambassador to the US told us (after almost 2,000 Palestinians had been slaughtered, most of them civilians) that the Israeli army should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its "unimaginable restraint" in the Gaza war, I had to glance at the calendar. Was it 1 April, perhaps? Was this some kind of gargantuan joke, so obscene, so grotesquely inappropriate, that it contained some inner meaning, some kernel of truth, which I had missed?

The Nobel Prize for "unimaginable restraint", according to Ron Dermer, should have been solemnly handed out to an army which much of the world believes guilty of war crimes.