Top Moscow officials have lashed out at a new US "bill from hell" which imposes sanctions on Russia's banking and energy industry, but said the country is well prepared to face the "racketeering" penalties.

The bill, sponsored by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democrat Bob Menendez, is based on a "precise, pragmatic and aggressive trade policy which has nothing to do with international trading rules," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.

As Washington continues to pile pressure on Moscow, the Russian government is weighing up "a number of efficient measures" to protect "against these attacks."

A former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence specialist who defected to Iran despite warnings from the FBI has been charged with revealing classified information to the Tehran government, including the code name and secret mission of a Pentagon program, prosecutors said.

The Justice Department also accused Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, of betraying former colleagues in the U.S. intelligence community by feeding details about their personal and professional lives to Iran. Four hackers linked to the Iranian government, charged in the same indictment, used that information to target the intelligence workers online, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Witt had been on the FBI's radar at least a year before she defected after she attended an Iranian conference and appeared in anti-American videos. She was warned about her activities, but told agents that she would not provide sensitive information about her work if she returned to Iran, prosecutors say. She was not arrested at the time.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the past two years of Donald Trump foreign policy has been the assumption that decisions made by the United States are binding on the rest of the world. Apart from time of war, no other nation has ever sought to prevent other nations from trading with each other. And the United States has also uniquely sought to penalize other countries for alleged crimes that did not occur in the US and that did not involve American citizens, while also insisting that all nations must comply with whatever penalties are meted out by Washington.

The United States now sees itself as judge, jury and executioner in policing the international community, a conceit that began post World War II when American presidents began referring to themselves as "leader of the free world." This pretense received legislative backing with passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987 (ATA) as amended in 1992 plus subsequent related legislation, to include the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act of 2016 (JASTA). The body of legislation can be used by US citizens or residents to obtain civil judgments against alleged terrorists anywhere in the world and can be employed to punish governments, international organizations and even corporations that are perceived to be supportive of terrorists, even indirectly or unknowingly. Plaintiffs are able to sue for injuries to their "person, property, or business" and have ten years to bring a claim.

Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii's democratic congresswoman and one of many entrants in the crowded 2020 presidential race, is already turning heads thanks to her anti-interventionist foreign policy approach and progressive stance on a variety of issues, making her an outlier among establishment Democrats.

If her pre-campaign messaging and campaign launch speech are any indicator, the potential presidential contender has no intention of backing down - especially when it comes to her strong advocacy of medical marijuana and harsh criticisms of the criminal justice system and pharmaceutical industry.

I'm old enough to remember the excitement that most of the world felt when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles - better known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. It was one of those epoch defining moments, with two seemingly implacable enemies, having stared each other down across the so-called Iron Curtain, and having engaged in a costly and potentially disastrous arms race, actually concluded that it was all rather pointless and certainly too dangerous to continue, and that a much better idea - and indeed a perfectly feasible one - was to sit down and come to an arrangement that benefited both sides, and made nuclear confrontation far less likely.

The result was a treaty, signed by the leaders of both countries in 1987, which eliminated missiles with a range of 500-5,500km, fired from land-based launchers. The purpose of this treaty was to guarantee (as much as such guarantees are possible) the security of Europe, which until that point had become a focal point of possible nuclear confrontation between the two sides, with American BGM-109G ground-launched cruise missiles based in Great Britain, West Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherland, and Soviet SS-20s missiles based in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, as well as on the territory of Russia.

Less than two years ago, Jamie Dimon (above), CEO of JPMorgan Chase, called Bitcoin a "fraud." Today his bank announced that it is planning imminent real-world tests of its own cryptocurrency, called "JPM Coin."

Bank-issued Bitcoin?

Far from it. The bank intends to use the new coin to settle payments between big institutions, and it will be redeemable 1:1 for US dollars, according to an FAQ post on the bank's website. JPMorgan moves more than $6 trillion around the world for its clients. In trials scheduled to begin in a few months, it plans to handle a small fraction of those payments using a homegrown blockchain.

A former professional boxer who became an unlikely star of the Yellow Vest protests after a video of him delivering blows at two French police officers went viral, has been sentenced to 30 months of jail, 18 of them suspended.

Christophe Dettinger, former French light heavyweight champion, was found guilty of assaulting police officers in Paris on January 5, as tensions were running high during a weekly Yellow Vest protest. The footage of Dettinger throwing punches at gendarmes has gained traction on social media, shooting him to fame, and was replayed during his trial on Wednesday.

Dettinger handed himself in two days after the incident, and argued that while he was ashamed of what he did he was not morally in the wrong. The retired boxer said that he charged the policemen on the spur of the moment to defend a fragile-looking woman pinned on the ground.

Investigation by cyber-security and intelligence experts William Binney and Larry Johnson

The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WIKILEAKS on July 26, 2016 were obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged "hack" no forensic evidence has been produced to support that claim. In fact, the available forensic evidence contradicts the official account that blames the leak of the DNC emails on a Russian internet "intrusion". The existing evidence supports an alternative explanation - the files taken from the DNC on between 23 and 25 May 2016 and were copied onto a file storage device, such as a thumb drive.

If the Russians actually had conducted an internet based hack of the DNC computer network then the evidence of such an attack would have been collected and stored by the National Security Agency. The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002. The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 "Intelligence Community Assessment," regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

The phrase, "moderate confidence" is intelligence speak for "we have no hard evidence." Thanks to the leaks by Edward Snowden, we know with certainty that the NSA had the capability to examine and analyze the DNC emails. NSA routinely "vacuumed up" email traffic transiting the U.S. using robust collection systems (whether or not anyone in the NSA chose to look for this data is another question). If those emails had been hijacked over the internet then NSA also would have been able to track the electronic path they traveled over the internet. This kind of data would allow the NSA to declare without reservation or caveat that the Russians were guilty. The NSA could admit to such a fact in an unclassified assessment without compromising sources and methods. Instead, the NSA only claimed to have moderate confidence in the judgement regarding Russian meddling. If the NSA had hard intelligence to support the judgement the conclusion would have been stated as "full confidence."

President Vladimir Putin wants to give crime bosses hard time. He has proposed legislation to jail crime lords just for accepting a leading position in the criminal world.

In the Russian Criminal Code, one could be jailed for organizing and leading a mob only if they are found guilty of involvement in a crime. Leaders of crime gangs often avoid punishment, as they aren't involved in crime personally, even if their position within a gang is widely known, Putin explained in a comment on the proposal.

Ukraine has taken the extraordinary step of deporting a senior cleric of the Moscow-aligned Orthodox Church and stripping him of his citizenship, marking a political escalation in the historic rift that has shaken the Eastern Orthodox world and further raised tensions between Kyiv and Moscow.

The move threatens to draw U.S. officials into the spat, since the Ukrainian-born Bishop Gedeon, whose given name is Yuriy Kharon, is said to hold U.S. citizenship.

U.S. Embassy officials in Kyiv could not immediately confirm whether or not he has U.S. citizenship.

Gedeon, of the Moscow Patriarchate Church in Ukraine, had just touched down at Kyiv's Boryspil Airport after a working trip to the United States when Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) agents detained him over accusations of promoting Russia's military aggression against the country and holding a second passport, reportedly American.

After being held for hours overnight on February 13 and interrogated, the Ukrainian-born cleric was stripped of his Ukrainian passport and then put on a plane to Frankfurt early on February 14, Ukrainian authorities and Moscow Patriarchate officials said in official statements. Ukrainian authorities claimed he had lied about losing the passport but then found it on him during the interrogation.