All fans visiting the 2018 World Cup will enjoy visa-free entry for the entirety of the event.

Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law that entitles visitors with "fan ID" issued by the Russian Government to visa-free entry into Russia for the time of the championship, as well as for a period of ten days before and after the competition.

To enter the country, the "fan ID" holders will need to provide an identification document, the ticket to the match and a document that verifies the purchase of the ticket.

The system will be similar to the one used during Sochi Olympics in 2014, which let spectators enter their personal information to an online database in order to receive the identification document from the Russian authorities.

The draft law that verifies the visa-free entry announced by Vladimir Putin in 2014 was passed last month by both houses of the Russian parliament, namely the Federation Council and the State Duma.

France's Socialist government once again used its emergency constitutional powers to force through a second reading of a controversial labor reform law, which has provoked months of street protests in the country.

"This country is too used to mass unemployment," Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament, as he invoked Article 49 of the French constitution, which allows laws to be approved without a parliamentary vote. "This is not posturing, it's not intransigence."

Valls said that 800 amendments had been made to the legislation - aimed at cutting down the country's 10 percent unemployment rate - since the first version of the law was driven through the lower chamber, the National Assembly, in May.

The prime minister, on the centrist wing of his party, labeled those who opposed the law, "the coalition of immobility," and said he was acting "in the general interests of the nation."

The National Assembly now has 24 hours to stage a no-confidence vote in the government, but it is unlikely to pass, as most of the Socialist party, and the center-right opposition, have already said that they will not attempt to topple Valls.

Though the FBI found that Hillary Clinton and her staff were "extremely careless" with State Department emails hosted on a private server, no criminal charges will be brought against the former secretary and current presidential candidate.

"No reasonable prosecutor" would bring criminal charges in this case, FBI Director James Comey told reporters Tuesday morning, after going into the details of the bureau's two-year investigation, which he described as a "painstaking undertaking requiring thousands of hours of effort."

"Three of those were classified at the time," he added.

Clinton used "several different servers and numerous mobile devices" to send and read emails on her personal domain during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Comey explained. The FBI set out to investigate any intentional or grossly negligent handling of classified information, as well as whether any hostile actors gained access to the files, after the intelligence community Inspector-General requested a probe.

Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton's Use of a Personal E-Mail System
Washington, D.C. July 05, 2016

Remarks prepared for delivery at press briefing.

Good morning. I'm here to give you an update on the FBI's investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.

After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.

This will be an unusual statement in at least a couple ways. First, I am going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest. Second, I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.

Fewer than 100 Syrian fighters have been trained under a revamped train-and-equip program run by the Pentagon, US media report. The new focus is on training rebel leaders as "spotters" of Islamic State targets for US-led coalition airstrikes, officials say.

The additional 100 Syrian rebel leaders have been trained to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) under a new Pentagon-run train-and-equip program since March, US officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity told reporters on Monday.

The revamped $416-million-worth program does not include training entire rebel units, according to Stars and Stripes. It mostly focuses on training Syrian rebel leaders as local informants and spotting potential targets on the grounds for US and coalition airstrikes."Rather than training 10 people to use a rifle, if you can train a smaller number of people to accurately describe their own position relative to the position of enemy forces, it enables them to better coordinate resupply and describe enemy positions," one official was cited by the newspaper as saying.

After the events in 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, which took place in Iran by overthrowing the Pahlavi dynasty, the new government of Iran was charged with a serious task: maintaining order and preventing a counter-revolution. The survival of the new government was crucial, especially since the previous dynasty was very close to the Western governments and the US. The most reliable mechanism for achieving this was, of course, military control. Regular forces of Iran's army were not enough to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic - we should keep in mind that much of the regular forces were leftovers of the previous regime and could not be fully trusted. However, revolutionary forces, which include the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij militia and the Quds Force, have had an enormous impact on maintaining the Islamic Republic's government, but also, the IRGC gained a significant position in Iranian society and state policy. The IRGC, which was formed in 1979, is a product of the Islamic Revolution and since then, as a military organisation in Iran, it became one of the pillars of the Iranian state. On the 5th of May 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a decree with which the IRGC was formed as a parallel military structure beside the Iranian Army. The IRGC was focused on internal matters rather than on external ones. The Revolutionary Council also stated eight categories of duties for the IRGC:

• Assisting security apparatus in dealing with counter-revolutionary elements
• Fighting armed counter-revolutionaries
• Battling against foreign forces inside the country
• Cooperating with the armed forces of the country in training subordinates in moral, ideological and political matters
• Assisting the government in implementing the Islamic Revolution
• Supporting liberation movements across the world in their fight for justice under the tutelage of the leader of the Islamic Revolution
• Utilising all resources in dire times of catastrophes and calamities in order the help and improve the society of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Putin's meetings with the Chinese leadership in Beijing and Tashkent consolidate the most powerful alliance in the world today.

Though it has received minimal attention in the West, last week Putin completed his 15th visit to China where he held intensive talks with the Chinese leadership led by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

This came directly after Putin met Xi Jinping at the immediately preceding Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tashkent. According to Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, whom Putin also met in Beijing, Xi Jinping has met Putin more often than he has met any other foreign leader.

On the Russian side the talks between Putin and the Chinese leadership in Beijing did not involve Putin alone. Putin's meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing started as a one-to-one meeting with just the two leaders and their interpreters present. It was then expanded to include top officials and ministers of both the Russian and Chinese governments.

Who are you going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That's the good word from Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the corporate media, in response to the "allegations" by Bernie Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.

I used scare quotes around the word "allegations" because the truth is plain to see and undeniable by anyone with a microgram of honesty: Hillary Clinton cheated. If the rules had been followed, Bernie Sanders would be the nominee.

As with all things Clinton, of course, definitions matter. It depends on what the meaning of "cheat" is.

To most people, "cheating" means breaking the rules of a contest. By this standard definition, there's no doubt that the Clinton campaign, its political allies and the Democratic National Committee cheated in favor of Clinton and against Sanders. They broke the law. They disenfranchised voters. They broke party rules. And they violated long-standing customs that are so widely accepted that they are essentially de facto rules of the Democratic Party and the American political system.

In this video the former finance minister of Greece and founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), Yanis Varoufakis, provides us an insight into why the European constitution does not represent the people of Europe and lacks substance. He also talks about disintegration of the European Union, what forces are driving its demise and how Orwellian language is used to hide this.

• Do we have a constitution that represents the voice of the European people?
• Could the EU disintegrate in the near future?
• What are the observations that are pointing towards a disintegrating European Union?
• Is Orwellianism being employed to deceive the population?

These questions and more are addressed in this video.

This has been an amazing week which saw the first clear sign of the collapse of the EU and Turkish President Erdogan presenting his excuses to Russia for the downing of a Russian SU-24 over Syria 7 month ago. While the latter event was largely eclipsed by the former, it might be the sign of something even more dramatic taking place: the collapse of Turkey.

Does that seem like hyperbole?

Let's look again.

The Presidency of Erdogan has been nothing short of cataclysmic for Turkey which resulted in a perfect storm of crises, each of them very serious:

1) Crisis in Syria: the Turkish policy of support for Daesh to overthrow Assad has failed. Abjectly so. Not only is Assad still in power, but the latest bombing in Turkey seem to indicated that Daesh is turning against Turkey now (assuming the official explanations is true, which it might not be as we will discuss below). The entire Syria policy of Erdogan is now in shambles.

2) Crisis with the EU: the last thing the Brits did before Brexiting was to tell Turkey that it could join the EU in 3000 years. Other EU member states were not as direct, but everybody knows that this is true. Furthermore, the grand Erdogan-Merkel friendship and alliance has completely fizzled out.