The leaders of Russia and the United States have held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, shortly after they both addressed the international community on the world's most pressing geopolitical issues.

The meeting between the two leaders lasted for approximately an hour and a half - surpassing the limit of 55 minutes. After the talks, President Putin walked out to meet the press and answer questions about the meeting and the speech he had delivered to UNGA.

"Today's meeting was very constructive, practical and surprisingly frank," the Russian President told the press. "We found a lot of common ground, but there are differences as well. In fact they are known, so there is no need to repeat them."

Translation and commentary by Kristina Rus

I think that the citizens of Ukraine, sitting in front of the TV, if did not shut it off, then spit on it.

Because the UN hardly heard more lies before coming from the podium. A man, who dropped his country below Gabon in Africa, said literally the following:

"Regarding Ukraine, I would like to emphasize that we managed to:

• reduce poverty threefold — however, due to Russian aggression we expect this indicator will fall
• improve the maternal health system
• cut child mortality by half [and how many babies did your army bomb in Donbass? - KR]
• to reduce the incidence of HIV/AIDS
• to make progress in the fight against tuberculosis [What about the shortage of vaccines and the polio epidemic? - KR]"

Also Poroshenko said:

"Today, Ukraine needs to implement the necessary systemic reforms, countering Russian aggression, trying to undermine democratic European development elected by the Ukrainian people [What about half the Ukrainian people who elected the Eurasian development? - KR]

As a result of treacherous Russian annexation of the Ukrainian Crimea and aggression in Donbass, thousands of people were killed.

"We left the meeting hall in protest against his openly politicized and aggressive speech which had nothing to do with the summit's topic," a top-ranking Russian diplomat said

The Russian delegation quitted the United Nations General Assembly during Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's speech at the U.N. summit on sustainable development, a top-ranking Russian diplomat told TASS late on Sunday.

"We left the meeting hall in protest against his openly politicized and aggressive speech which had nothing to do with the summit's topic," the diplomat said.

One Russian diplomat however remained in the hall. When asked why this diplomat stayed, the source said, "The Russian side is in the habit of heeding its opponents and not ignoring their words."

British children should be taught about the violent expansionist excesses of British imperialism, according Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn told young Labour supporters on Monday that the national curriculum should include lessons on how the British Empire expanded "at the expense of people."

"Perhaps we could do a little bit more about how history is taught in our schools," said Corbyn, who is a lifelong anti-imperialist and peace campaigner.

He said that while "the history of European expansion is important" there are "two other things that need to be added to that."

"One is the expansion of one empire at the expense of people where that empire is expanding. You need to get the story from the people where that empire is expanding into rather than those that came there to take control of it."

As Congress scurries to avoid another government shutdown, lawmakers may be ready to once again bring up a controversial information-sharing bill for consideration this week, which critics dubbed "a surveillance bill masquerading as a cybersecurity bill."

According to a report by Politico, confusion reigns at the Senate as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) mulls over the chamber's upcoming schedule. One unidentified source told the outlet that it was "likely" McConnell paves the way for a reintroduction of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), but others said the situation was still "very uncertain."

If passed into law, the bill would give companies greater liability protection when it comes to collecting personal data that could potentially be related to security threats. It would also allow them to share that information with government departments such as the National Security Agency.

The terrorist group Islamic State has shut down playgrounds in a Syrian city, because unrelated men and women bringing their children to play there could mingle, a monitoring group has reported.

The Islamic State morality police Hesbah targeted playgrounds in the city of Mayadin in the eastern Deir ez-Zor province, local sources told the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Several men and women were arrested by ISIS gunmen "for not abiding by Islamic rules on dress."

A similar crackdown on playgrounds was reported in the ISIS Syrian stronghold of Raqqa, where three women were arrested for not being accompanied by men.

The radical Islamist group is enforcing a harsh interpretation of Islam, including a Saudi Arabia-style segregation of genders, under which men and women cannot interact unless they are related by blood or are married. Women also must be accompanied by male relatives in public places under those rules.

ISIS has taken large swaths of Iraq and Syria and is aspiring to create a theocratic Sunni Islam state. It resorts to act of harsh violence to quench opposition and demands conversion from those who want to stay.

Mr. President,

Mr. Secretary General,

Distinguished heads of state and government,

Ladies and gentlemen,

The 70th anniversary of the United Nations is a good occasion to both take stock of history and talk about our common future. In 1945, the countries that defeated Nazism joined their efforts to lay a solid foundation for the postwar world order. Let me remind you that key decisions on the principles defining interaction between states, as well as the decision to establish the UN, were made in our country, at the Yalta Conference of the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition.

The Yalta system was truly born in travail. It was born at the cost of tens of millions of lives and two world wars that swept through the planet in the 20th century. Let's be fair: it helped humankind pass through turbulent, and at times dramatic, events of the last seven decades. It saved the world from large-scale upheavals.

The United Nations is unique in terms of legitimacy, representation and universality. True, the UN has been criticized lately for being inefficient or for the fact that decision-making on fundamental issues stalls due to insurmountable differences, especially among Security Council members.

"The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us."—Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report

We are a scant 40 years away from the futuristic world that science fiction author Philip K. Dick envisioned for Minority Report in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

Unfortunately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we may have already arrived at the year 2054.

Increasingly, the world around us resembles Dick's dystopian police state in which the police combine widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining and precognitive technology to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. In other words, the government's goal is to prevent crimes before they happen: precrime.

For John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in Washington, DC, the technology that he relies on for his predictive policing proves to be fallible, identifying him as the next would-be criminal and targeting him for preemptive measures. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.

Seemingly taking its cue from science fiction, technology has moved so fast in the short time since Minority Report premiered in 2002 that what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction. Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, Spielberg's unnerving vision of the future is fast becoming our reality.

Examples abound.

Open the Books is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization laser focused on providing transparency in government. I've highlighted their work in the past, but their latest report on inexcusable EPA waste and abuse may be the most outrageous information yet.

Specifically, we learn that the EPA spent $92.5 million of taxpayer money on high-end, luxury furniture over the past decade.

The Washington Times covered the story:

The federal agency that has the job of protecting the environment doesn't seem to have too much concern for trees, at least the ones cut down to make furniture.

The Environmental Protection Agency over the past decade has spent a whopping $92.4 million to purchase, rent, install and store office furniture ranging from fancy hickory chairs and a hexagonal wooden table, worth thousands of dollars each, to a simple drawer to store pencils that cost $813.57.

The furniture shopping sprees equaled about $6,000 for every one of the agency's 15,492 employees, according to federal spending data made public by the government watchdog OpenTheBooks.com.

And the EPA doesn't buy just any old office furniture. Most of the agency's contracts are with Michigan-based retailer Herman Miller Inc. According to the contracts, the EPA spent $48.4 million on furnishings from the retailer known for its high-end, modern furniture designs.

Just one of Herman Miller's "Aeron" office chairs retails for nearly $730 on the store's website. The EPA has spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and install those types of chairs in its offices.

The agency also paid another high-end retailer, Knoll Inc., nearly $5 million for furnishings. Knoll is known for its specialized modern furnishings, and 40 of its designs are on permanent display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The EPA defended its spending, saying the agency needed the furniture after it moved buildings.

Ever heard of IKEA?

The messages uncovered were exchanged between Mrs Clinton and General David Petraeus

The Obama administration has discovered a further chain of emails that Hillary Clinton failed to disclose when giving over a supposed full record of work related correspondence during her time as Secretary of State.

The Democrat front runner came under fire earlier this year for using a private email account when in government office. She has since stated she has handed over the entirety of her work emails.

The messages uncovered today were exchanged between Mrs Clinton and General David Petraeus, when he headed the US military's Central Command, in charge of running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They began before Mrs Clinton started as Secretary of State and continued into her early days in the role.

Officials have stated the emails are largely personal, however it calls into question Mrs Clinton's claim on the CBS television network this week that "we provided all of them", when asked whether she had disclosed the messages from her private account.

The FBI and several congressional committees are investigating.

A State Department spokesman James Kirby the agency will incorporate the newly discovered emails into a review of record retention practices that Clinton's successor, John Kerry, has intiated.

He added: "We have also informed Congress of this matter."