Outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) derailed a CNN discussion on Tuesday about the thousands of undocumented immigrants arriving in the U.S. from Central America by calling them "invaders" and linking them to at least one rape case and an auto accident from six years ago.

"Foreign nationals that have come into the United States are between 300- to 500,000," Bachmann told an incredulous Crossfire co-host Van Jones. "My heart is broken for a female college student in Minnesota who was raped, murdered and mutilated by a foreign national who came into our country. We had a school bus full of kids in Minnesota - four children were killed on that school bus because an illegal alien driving a van went into that schoolbus."

"There are lines that can't be crossed here," Jones responded. "I'm sorry, congresswoman. Are you gonna scapegoat children for the crime of this despicable person?"

Imposing sanctions on Russia and blaming it for destabilizing Ukraine contradicts US national interests, President Putin said at the BRICS summit in Brazil, emphasizing that declared support of Ukrainians should not be limited to the country's oligarchs.

Speaking to the press following the BRICS summit in Brazil, Vladimir Putin was asked to comment on the new package of sanctions against Russia announced just minutes earlier by the US President.

"We aren't the ones introducing sanctions, you should ask them," Putin said.

"But as for sanctions, they usually have a boomerang effect, and without a doubt will force US-Russian relations into a corner," he elaborated. "This is a serious blow to our relationship. And it undermines the long term security interests of the US State and its people."

Putin said that it is "regrettable" that "our partners" have chosen to impose new sanctions, but Russia "will not close doors to negotiations."

"We're open to finding ways out of this situation," Putin said. "I really hope that common sense and the willingness to resolve all issues through peaceful diplomatic means will prevail."

Commenting on the Ukrainian crisis Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi urged to give up calls for a new Cold War and underlined that Europe should not be built in opposition to Russia.

"Within the EU we need to respect the cry for freedom of the Ukrainian people but we cannot build Europe in opposition to our neighbor - Russia," Renzi said speaking at the Democratic Party PD National Assembly late Tuesday.

The Prime Minister of Italy, which has recently taken over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union from Greece, noted that "today we do not need to declare a Cold War, but should be capable of creating means for a dialogue."

EU leaders will discuss additional sanctions to be imposed on Russia over the Ukrainian crisis later Wednesday.

Last week, 11 new names have already been added to the sanctions list.

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy - which was always exclusively for Jews - has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of Israel's most enlightened and educated citizens - 1 million of them - have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists - Israeli and Palestinian - are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America's democracy.

And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses. They wring their hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the demolition of Palestinian homes. They assure us that they respect human rights and want peace. But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is held up before them. This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state. It exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the transfer, forced immigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories.

Reality shatters the fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bare the fact that Israel routinely has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish settlers. Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane. Reality unveils the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world. Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country's parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel, however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol, which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the core of modern Zionism.

For years, homeowners have been battling Wall Street in an attempt to recover some portion of their massive losses from the housing Ponzi scheme. But progress has been slow, as they have been outgunned and out-spent by the banking titans.

In June, however, the banks may have met their match, as some equally powerful titans strode onto the stage. Investors led by BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, and PIMCO, the world's largest bond-fund manager, have sued some of the world's largest banks for breach of fiduciary duty as trustees of their investment funds. The investors are seeking damages for losses surpassing $250 billion. That is the equivalent of one million homeowners with $250,000 in damages suing at one time.

The defendants are the so-called trust banks that oversee payments and enforce terms on more than $2 trillion in residential mortgage securities. They include units of Deutsche Bank AG, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings PLC, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. Six nearly identical complaints charge the trust banks with breach of their duty to force lenders and sponsors of the mortgage-backed securities to repurchase defective loans.

Why the investors are only now suing is complicated, but it involves a recent court decision on the statute of limitations. Why the trust banks failed to sue the lenders evidently involves the cozy relationship between lenders and trustees. The trustees also securitized loans in pools where they were not trustees. If they had started filing suit demanding repurchases, they might wind up sued on other deals in retaliation. Better to ignore the repurchase provisions of the pooling and servicing agreements and let the investors take the losses - better, at least, until they sued.

Beyond the legal issues are the implications for the solvency of the banking system itself. Can even the largest banks withstand a $250 billion iceberg? The sum is more than 40 times the $6 billion "London Whale" that shook JPMorganChase to its foundations.

In an extended segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver turned his gaze on income inequality, noting that Americans overwhelmingly believe that the system favors the rich while, at the same time, accepting it, believing they too will somehow be rich someday.

"Our main story tonight, is income inequality." Oliver began. "A good way to figure out which side of it you're on, is whether you are currently paying for HBO, or stealing it."

Noting that President Obama recently delivered a speech where he used the expression 'income inequality,' twenty-six times, calling it "the defining issue of our times," Oliver pointed out that Democrats immediately retreated on the issue in the face of accusations of class warfare.

"So basically, income inequality has become just another topic of conversation we prefer to avoid in America, like Japanese internment camps or that time we gave Roberto Bengini an Academy Award. National tragedies, equally wrong," he said.

A federal judge ruled California's death penalty unconstitutional Wednesday, writing that lengthy and unpredictable delays have resulted in an arbitrary and unfair capital punishment system.

The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney represents a legal victory for those who want to abolish the death penalty in California and follows a similar ruling that has suspended executions in the state for years.

Ruling in a case brought against the warden of San Quentin state prison by Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned in 1994, Carney called the death penalty an empty promise.

"Inordinate and unpredictable delay has resulted in a death penalty system in which very few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will be, executed by the State," Carney wrote.

He continued, writing that "arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed."

Following Hamas' rejection of a ceasefire proposal by Egypt, the group may have announced its own terms for a 10-year truce, replete with conditions that Israel will never be willing to meet.

Early reports are signaling that Hamas, along with the Gaza terrorist group Islamic Jihad, are proposing a cessation of hostilities in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners who were initially released in the prisoner exchange that freed kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. A number of the men were rearrested during Israel's operation to find the men who abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank last month.

The Times of Israel reports some of the other demands:

[Hamas also] demands that all crossings to the Gaza Strip be opened, and that the Rafah crossing to Egypt be secured by UN forces. It calls for an airport to be established in the Strip, that fishing areas be expanded, and that Israeli aircraft alter their flight routes such that none fly over the coastal enclave.

The Israeli site Arutz Sheva adds:

There is no official confirmation of the offer and it is being greeted with skepticism, as more of a trial balloon than an actual offer.

It seems fair to say that few of these demands will be taken seriously by Israel. Let's have a look at them.

An Egyptian ceasefire proposal aimed at ending the week-long battle between Israel and Hamas was accepted by Israel's cabinet on Tuesday, but rejected by Hamas. Here's what you need to know.

A new Egypt makes all the difference

Egypt mediated the last ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in 2012, but those were entirely different days. Back then, Egypt's ruler was Mohamed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood bona fides made him a natural ally of Hamas. With Morsi deposed and military rule restored, Egypt did not pursue the kinds of concessions that Morsi extracted from Israel in 2012. (Israel initially rejected a ceasefire in 2012 before agreeing on one.)

This time around, Egypt also didn't include Hamas in the negotiations. Feeling left out, Hamas acted out a little bit.

The proposal

What the ceasefire proffered by Egypt was pretty straightforward. Most importantly, a cessation of hostilities and some ease of movement and goods along the borders. The basic components of it returned things back to its 2012 ceasefire state.

Why Hamas rejected it

Hamas, in essence, needs to justify why it just went through the trouble of making Gaza the target of some nearly 1,600 Israeli airstrikes. In order to do so, the ceasefire needed to include something that would be construed as a victory for Hamas. In other words, some improvement over the 2012 ceasefire conditions or some of the demands the group has been calling for.

Ukraine's Western-backed leaders on Tuesday invited pro-Kremlin insurgents to a videoconference aimed at halting spiralling violence and what Kiev warned was an imminent invasion by thousands of Russian troops.

Kiev sharply raised the stakes in Europe's most explosive crisis in decades by declaring on Monday that a Ukrainian transport plane downed in the eastern conflict zone had been hit by a rocket fired from the Russian side of the frontier between the two ex-Soviet states.

Russia has broken with its traditional denials of all links to the uprising by not publicly responding to the charge.

A top Ukrainian general went a step further by telling a live television audience in Kiev that he feared a Russian invasion was imminent.

"Ukraine, like never before, stands on the cusp of a wide-scale aggression from our current northern border," said National Security and Defence Council Deputy Secretary Mykhaylo Koval.

The former defence minister said the Kremlin had parked 22,000 troops in the annexed Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and had other units stretching from the north-central region of Chernigiv to the southeastern edge of the Russian-Ukranian border on the Sea of Azov.