The Russian lower house Committee for Constitutional Law has recommended rejecting a bill drafted by Communist Party MPs that proposes fines for any public demonstration of non-traditional sexual relations.

The chairman of the committee, Vladimir Pligin MP (United Russia), told reporters on Monday that its members voted unanimously to reject the draft.

The bill introducing punishment for any public demonstration of non-traditional sexual relations was prepared and drafted by Ivan Nikitchuk and Nikolai Arefyev of the Communist Party caucus. The lawmakers want anyone who shows "distorted sexual preferences" in public places to be fined between 4000 and 5000 rubles ($53-$66). Similar actions in educational or cultural establishments should carry up to 15 days in jail, the draft reads.

One of the authors of the bill said that by "the demonstration of sexual relations" they meant "kissing and holding hands." When asked who should control the observation of the new rules, should they be adopted, he answered that it could be included in the responsibilities of the Russian police.

Almost 70 units of heavy armaments and armored vehicles, as well as a few hundred militants of the UAF have been moved this week to the line of contact. Today, the representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Donetsk People's Republic Eduard Basurin confirmed this, reports Donetsk News Agency.

According to Basurin, intelligence of the DPR continues to detect the concentration of military equipment and personnel of the APU in three areas: Gorlovka, Donetsk and Mariupol. Six howitzers "Pion" and "Hyacinth" caliber 152 mm, seven MLRS "Grad", BMP 12, up to 20 vehicles with ammunition and personnel and up to 10 buses with fighters of the 54th mechanized brigade and two platoons of the battalion "Aidar" were found by reconnaissance in the Gorlovka direction.

A high-level American delegation is expected to visit Israel next week to work out the final details of a new 10-year military aid package. The American delegation, composed of members of US National Security Council, will hold meetings with Israeli security and military staff, Israeli media reported Tuesday. The National Security Council assists the US president on national security and foreign policies.

On top of the agenda is the technical details of an approximately $41 billion 10-year military package, the Haaretz newspaper reported, citing a source involved in the talks. The new agreement would come into effect from October 2018.

Washington is currently providing Tel Aviv with $3.1 billion in military assistance annually and the new deal would likely increase that amount to $4.1 billion. Israeli officials have urged Washington to increase the aid to $5 billion. The current aid is separate from the nearly $500 million in annual US funding for Israel's missile system programs in recent years. It is also on top of the US military equipment held in Israel, which is valued at $1.2 billion.

Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II. US military aid to Israel has amounted to $124.3 billion since it began in 1962, according to a recent US congressional report. Strong congressional support for Israel has resulted in Israel receiving benefits not available to any other country.

German tabloid Bild has accused starving residents of the Syrian town of Madaya of being "actors." But RT's correspondent believes some media simply dislike what people suffering from malnutrition had to say about rebels selling off government aid.

Last week RT's Murad Gazdiev accompanied the Red Cross and the UN convoy that brought food to the besieged Syrian town of Madaya, some 44km northwest of the capital, Damascus, close to the Lebanese border.

The images of hunger-bitten children outraged the world and the stories told by their mothers are truly shocking.

Madaya citizens told RT that the Syrian government had sent them aid, but they never got it because it was seized by the rebels, who sold humanitarian aid off to starving people at ridiculously high prices. A kilogram of rice was fetching as much as $250.

Those filmed by RT - women, children and some men, mostly elderly and sick - were not allowed to leave Madaya because no agreement had been reached and all those people were forced to pick up their bags and go back to the town, where there is no food.

But their words struck the wrong chords with some media outlets, such as Germany's Bild, which accused the aid organizations and RT of forming a conspiracy with President Bashar Assad.

The German tabloid accused the people trying to escape from Madaya of being "regime actors" of Assad's government.

Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg's lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott's grandmother, Alma Holland White.

White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants' neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams' farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.

When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White's grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ''It just felt like the right thing to do,'' he says today. ''I felt a connection to those folks.''

The connection was not obvious at their first meeting. About a week after his phone call, Tennant drove from Parkersburg with his wife to Taft's headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firm's glassed-in reception area on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of one of Taft's founders. Tennant — burly and nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap — did not resemble a typical Taft client. ''He didn't show up at our offices looking like a bank vice president,'' says Thomas Terp, a partner who was Bilott's supervisor. ''Let's put it that way.''

Cases of discrimination against Muslims in the United States are on the rise, former New York Supreme Court clerk Tahanie Aboushi told Sputnik.

Aboushi, now a practicing attorney, represents four Americans of various ethnicities who claim to have been the target of bias by the airline carrier American Airlines.

"I think they do happen on a regular basis," Aboushi said on Tuesday. "More frequently than one would think and it has decreased due to the political climate and the discussions that take place concerning the Middle East and Muslims."

According to a number of top U.S. psychologists, like Harvard professor and researcher Howard Gardener, Donald Trump is a "textbook" narcissist. In fact, he fits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George Simon told Vanity Fair, "He's so classic that I'm archiving video clips of him to use in workshops." This puts Trump in the same category as a number of infamous dictators like Muammar Gaddafi, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Saddam Hussein. And although there are narcissists out there who entertain us, innovate, or create great art, when a narcissist is given immense power over people's lives, they can behave much differently. As the 2016 presidential election grows nearer we must ask ourselves, if elected president would Donald Trump act on the behalf of the will of the people, or would he behave more like a dictator—silencing any dissenting voices, perpetually refusing to compromise, and being oppressive to certain groups? To answer that, we should ask a little bit more about what makes a narcissist tick, and how they tend to behave when given free rein.

What is it exactly that makes someone a certifiable narcissist and not simply a person who has a healthy amount of confidence and a burning desire to achieve great goals? According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder is "a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others."

The lifting of sanctions is an unequivocal victory for Iran, sealing its regional position, and leaving its nuclear capability intact

Confirmation that international sanctions on Iran have at last been lifted is unequivocally a victory for Iran. The sanctions should never have been imposed in the first place. Said in April last year in an article I wrote for Sputnik, the evidence suggests Iran did indeed once have a nuclear weapons programme. That programme was not however intended as a threat to the US or Israel or - needless to say - the EU. The Iranian leadership is fully aware that a nuclear weapons programme targeting those countries is far more likely to provoke an attack on Iran than to deter one, and that Iran might not survive such an attack.

Rather Iran's nuclear programme was intended to deter a nuclear attack from Iran's main regional rival - Saddam Hussein's Iraq - which is known to have had a nuclear weapons programme in the decade preceding the 1991 Gulf War. Having fought a bitter war against Saddam Hussein between 1980 and 1988, Iran could not afford to let him acquire nuclear weapons whilst being itself disarmed. It is entirely understandable therefore that the Iranian leadership sought to counter Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programme with a nuclear weapons programme of their own.

All the evidence however points to the Iranian nuclear weapons programme being significantly downgraded in the decade following Saddam Hussein's defeat in 1991, and then having been abandoned completely following his overthrow in 2003. Not only is that the conclusion all the evidence points to, but it is also the opinion of the US intelligence community, which in 2007 publicly confirmed that Iran was no longer pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.

Facing the gleaming Doha skyline on a Persian Gulf winter carries the merit of a panoramic perspective. Most nations around it are going into melt down and the remaining ones - with the exception of Iran - exhibit neither the political leadership nor the economic and institutional infrastructure to do anything other than to meekly accept whatever tsunami hits their shores. They are nothing but scared spectators.

The Empire of Chaos has enough warmongering hardware pre-positioned within spitting distance to turn the whole of Southwest Asia into ashes - as a gaggle of usual suspects in the Beltway, neocon or neoliberalcon, still can't find a cure to their itching to "really win the next war" in a sort of exponential Shock and Awe.

In his latest column for The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan slammed hawks complaining that Washington had 'given away the store' in the Iran nuclear deal. Tehran, he notes, negotiated in good faith, showed that they weren't lying about their weapons program, and proved that they don't want a suicidal war with the US or its regional allies.

The more radically-minded elements of Iran's leadership may very well be grumbling about the Iranian nuclear deal, Buchanan suggests. "For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei] agreed to."

"Last week, he gave his blessing to the return of 10 US sailors who intruded into Iranian waters within hours of capture. He turned loose four Americans convicted of spying." Moreover, "ordered by the US and [the UN] Security Council to prove Iran was not lying when it said it had no nuclear weapons program - an assertion supported by 16 US intelligence agencies 'with high confidence' in 2007 - the Ayatollah had to submit to the following demands:"