The security detail for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan clashed with opposing activists for the second day in a row in Washington, DC, removing journalists and even confronting city police after law enforcement refused to remove protesters from the area. With Erdogan set to give a speech at the Brookings Institute on Thursday, a group of protesters opposing his crackdown on free speech in Turkey, his government's treatment of the country's Kurdish population, and what they say is his tolerance of Islamic State, gathered near the DC-based think tank to express their opposition.

The scene quickly devolved into chaos as demonstrators tried to get closer to Brookings, with journalists tweeting that Erdogan's security scuffled with protesters. Erdogan's security detail became physical with reporters, removing one journalist from Brookings, kicking another, and throwing a female reporter to the sidewalk, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Turkish bodyguards also told a cameraman that he is not allowed to film outside of the building. Another was chased across the street, while Foreign Policy said its reporters were scolded by security. In another case, Erdogan's security reportedly called one female journalist "a PKK whore" for standing near the Brookings building.

Saudi Arabia announced that it is building a drone plant in cooperation with South Africa, but a well-known Saudi defense analyst claimed this is a guise to hide the clandestine purchases of aircraft from Israel.

The analyst, who calls himself "Mujtahid" has been leaking exclusive information about the royal family of Saudi Arabia on Twitter since the early 2000s. He challenged the official report released by the Saudi Defense Ministry this week, which stated the kingdom would build a drone factory in collaboration with South Africa. "The report aims to hide the fact that Saudi Arabia intends to purchase drones from Israel via South Africa," he said.

"Saudi Arabia buys Israeli drones through South Africa. These drones later arrive from South Africa, dismantled, to Saudi Arabia, where they are assembled," Mujtahid added, describing the mechanism developed to carry out the Israeli-Saudi deal. He went on to accuse Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is Saudi Defense Minister and, according to some experts, the country's second most powerful person, of serving Israel's interest by purchasing drones from the Jewish state.

Saudi Arabia has been trying for years to strengthen its armed forces with drone capabilities. In 2010, General Atomics, the US producer of the Predator drone family, announced it had acquired export licenses for a number of Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia. Export to Saudi Arabia has so far failed to materialize, even though a similar deal with the United Arab Emirates was approved by the US Congress in 2015.

For many more years than any intelligent person would want to count, Israel was the sacred cow of the United States. From its violent, bloody, genocidal inception that involved the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians, and the murder of another 10,000, right through to the illegal, immoral occupation of the West Bank and blockade (aka occupation) of the Gaza Strip, Israel, in the view of U.S. governance and politics, could do no wrong. Anyone who dared to criticize Israel's many crimes was accused of anti-Semitism; as Dr. Norman Finkelstein said, "whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle, its apologists sound the alarm that a 'new anti-Semitism' is upon us". In the past, if a Jew, such as Dr. Finkelstein, was critical of Israel, Zionists raised the cry that he was 'a self-hating Jew', and U.S. politicians bought that ridiculous line. As a result, Israel became the beneficiary of the bulk of U.S. foreign aid, and has relied on the U.S. for years for protection from international accountability for its crimes, with the U.S always happy to veto any United Nations resolution condemning Israeli violations of human rights and international law.

Oh, but what a difference a 51-day, genocidal onslaught can make! This, of course, refers to the invasion and carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014. Israel had previously been able to 'mow the grass', as it refers to these periodic bombing episodes, with complete impunity. But thanks largely to social media, the world stopped believing that vulnerable, little Israel, with the fourth largest military in the world, and supplied and backed by the largest, was in grave danger from Big Bad Palestine, a nation it illegally occupies, and which has no army, navy or air force. Ongoing settlement activity by apartheid Israel, along with Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu's declaration that Palestinians would never have an independent state while he is prime murderer, and a conflicted relationship with his favorite check-writer, President Barack Obama, seem to have soured the whole thing for Israel.

Moscow has submitted data on Turkey's illegal arms and military hardware supply to Islamic State in Syria to the UN Security Council. Supplies are supervised by the Turkish intelligence service, Russian UN envoy Vitaly Churkin said as cited by Russian media. The main supplier of arms and military equipment to Islamic State (IS, Daesh, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants is Turkey, which uses non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for this purpose. The National Intelligence Organization of Turkey is in charge of the operations. Transportation is carried out mainly via automobiles, including humanitarian aid convoys, Churkin wrote in a letter to the UN Security Council (UNSC).

Terrorist groups operating in Syria received explosive materials worth $ 1.9 million via Turkey last year, according to the letter.

In total, the terrorists were delivered 2.5 thousand tons of ammonium nitrate (worth around $788,700), 456 tons of potassium nitrate ($468,700), 75 tons of aluminum powder ($496,500), sodium nitrate ($19,400), glycerin ($102,500) and nitric acid ($34,000 thousand) via Turkey in 2015, Churkin wrote.

By his military withdrawal, Putin was actually enhancing his leverage over both the military situation and the political negotiations still to come

When Russian President Vladimir Putin had a substantive meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry last week, it was an extremely rare departure from normal protocol. There was some political logic to the meeting, however, because Putin and Kerry have clearly been the primary drivers of their respective governments' policies toward Syria, and their negotiations have already led to a stunningly successful Syrian ceasefire and possible Syrian negotiations on a political settlement.

Washington and Moscow had to cooperate in order to get that ceasefire along with the jump-starting of intra-Syrian negotiations, now scheduled to begin next month, according to UN special envoy Steffan de Mistura. But the diplomatic maneuvering did not involve equal influence on each other's policies. Putin's Russia has now demonstrated that it has effective leverage over the policy of Kerry and the United States in Syria, whereas Kerry has no similar leverage over Russian policy.

Finland Defense Minister Jussi Niinisto said Russia doesn't pose a threat to his country.

Niinisto said that while his country is well aware of Russia developing its military potential and conducting numerous snap military exercises, Helsinki doesn't consider it a threat.

"Finland does not perceive any direct military threat coming from Russia," Niinistö said during an interview with the online newspaper Lenta.ru.

The minister also said that due to the fact that the ongoing crisis in Ukraine may in fact become permanent, he believes that Finland should maintain its contacts with Russia.

Donald Trump sparked a firestorm on Wednesday when he said women should be punished for getting illegal abortions. "There has to be some form of punishment," the GOP presidential front-runner told MSNBC's Chris Matthews during a combative interview.

Matthews had asked Trump whether he would seek to ban abortion and how he would enforce such a policy. "The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment," Trump said in the interview taped for a town hall forum airing later Wednesday.

"For the woman?" Matthews asked.

"Yeah, there has to be some form," Trump responded. Matthews pressed Trump repeatedly on abortion and to clarify his own stance.

"Should abortion be punished? This is not something you can dodge," he asked Trump.

"Well, people in certain parts of the Republican Party, conservative Republicans, would say, 'Yes, they should be punished,' " Trump responded.

Tens of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with less-than-honorable discharges, many with physical and mental injuries, were being denied care by the Department of Veterans Affairs, claims a new report by a veterans' advocacy group.

"The VA created much broader exclusion criteria than Congress provided, failing to give veterans due credit for their service to our country," said the report by advocacy group Swords to Plowshares, published on Wednesday.

Under the 1944 GI Bill, Congress expanded eligibility for veteran benefits to almost all veterans, even those with less-than-honorable discharges, provided the misconduct was not so severe that it should have led to a trial by court-martial and a dishonorable discharge. Congress left open the door to benefits for spectrum of discharges between honorable and dishonorable, including "undesirable" and "other than honorable."

The report found the VA labeled 90 percent of veterans with bad paper discharges as "dishonorable," even though the military classified them differently.

"Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this... That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one."—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: "What's the difference between a politician and a psychopath?"

The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. "At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups," author James G. Long notes. "We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed."

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

So why do we keep doing it over and over again?

An investigation into a massive global oil bribery scandal has been launched by authorities in the US, Britain, and Australia, after leaked confidential files indicated that some of the world's most powerful corporations were part of the racket.

The global investigation by authorities comes after the biggest leak of confidential files in the history of the oil industry, obtained by The Huffington Post, unveiled widespread corruption taking place in oil-rich countries. The US Department of Justice, FBI, UK National Crime Agency and Australian Federal Police are now jointly investigating the allegations in what could become the world's biggest probe into corruption allegations.

The scandal is being revealed in a three-part series titled The Bribe Factory, which is the result of a six-month investigation by The Huffington Post and Australia's Fairfax Media.