The American Embassy in Baghdad plans to evacuate a substantial number of its personnel this week in the face of a militant advance that rapidly swept from the north toward the capital, the State Department announced on Sunday.

The embassy, a beige fortress on the banks of the Tigris River within the heavily secured Green Zone, where Iraqi government buildings are also situated, has the largest staff of any United States Embassy.

The exact number of people being evacuated from Baghdad - the American government prefers to say they are being "relocated" - was not disclosed. But the embassy will remain open, and most of its staff will remain, according to the State Department.

The United States has a staff of about 5,500 at the embassy and at two consulates in the north and south of Iraq.

"Some additional U.S. government security personnel will be added to the staff in Baghdad; other staff will be temporarily relocated - both to our consulate generals in Basra and Erbil and to the Iraq Support Unit in Amman," Jordan, Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

You have stated on your website and confirmed in an interview with the BBC that "We (presumably that's you as prime minister and President Bush) didn't cause the Iraq crisis." The main cause of what is happening in Iraq today is, you said, the "predictable and malign effect" of the Western failure to intervene in Syria. And you are calling for unspecified intervention in Iraq. I presume you mean drone and other air attacks - war without American and British boots on the ground.

I think the leaders of all the major powers are to be condemned for allowing the slaughter and destruction in Syria to proceed, so I agree that intervention to stop it was needed. The question is - what form should intervention have taken?

In my view what was required at a very early point was a private conversation between President Obama and President Putin. In it Obama would have said to Putin something like, "What's your price for requiring President Assad to stand down and make way for internationally supervised elections?" That's the way an American president who was a real statesman would have played it. My speculation is that Putin would have responded positively on terms acceptable to Obama.

Now to your assertion that you and President Bush should not be blamed in whole or in part for what is happening in Iraq today.

As anyone who has worked there knows, Kabul is a tough place, redeemed by the charm of the people and the abundance of cheap taxis. But Trevor Paglen had trouble finding a taxi driver willing and able to take him where he wanted to go: north-east out of the city along an old back road reputed to be so dangerous - even by Afghan standards - that it had seen no regular traffic for more than 30 years. Finally he succeeded in digging out an old man who had been driving a cab since before the Soviet invasion. "We started driving and we left the city behind and we're out in the sticks," he recalls, "and we end up in a traffic jam - not cars but goats. And we wait for the goats to go by and we see the shepherd, this very old man, traditional Afghan clothes, big beard, exactly what you'd picture in your head. But he's wearing a baseball hat.

"The shepherd finally turns to look at us in the car - and on that baseball cap are the letters KBR. It stands for Kellogg Brown and Root - a company that was a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Dick Cheney was on the board of. The local goatherd is wearing a Dick Cheney baseball cap!" It was the final clue he needed that this particular bad road was the right road. There in the distance, behind a high cream wall and coiled razor wire, was what Paglen was looking for: the nondescript structures of what he says he is "99.999 per cent sure" is the place they call the Salt Pit: a never-before-identified-or-photographed secret CIA prison.

Trevor Paglen is an artist of a very particular kind. His principal tool is the camera, and most of his works are photographs, but the reason they are considered to be art - the reason, for example, that this bland photo, three feet wide by two feet high, showing the outer wall and the interior roof outline of the Salt Pit, with a dun-coloured Afghan hill behind it, sells for $20,000 - is because of the arduous, painstaking, sometimes dangerous path that culminated in pressing the shutter; and because it reveals something that the most powerful state in history has done everything in its power to keep secret.

First, I have to explain the title: "A scorecard for US war on Russia": what we are witnessing today is beyond any doubt a US war on Russia, except that it that is is neither quite "cold" nor "hot": it's tepid, lukewarm. Not for the people dying of course, but by it's choice of methods. It is not a Cold War because people are dying, because tanks, artillery and airpower is being used on a daily basis now, but it is not a Hot War either, because while people in the Ukraine are being killed, the real target of this war is, of course, Russia. In other words, this is not a Russian-Ukrainian war, nor is it a US-Ukrainian war, it is a US-Russian war, fought in the Ukraine with "Hot War" methods, but whose real target are not the murdered people in the Ukraine but Russia as a country and a civilizational project. I think that it is crucial to state that to make a correct analysis of what is going on.

In a newly unearthed audio interview Hillary Clinton reveals how she managed to get a plea bargain for a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl - and shockingly laughs as she indicated she knew he may have been guilty.

During the course of the conversation which dates from the early 1980s, Clinton, then 27, outlines how she used a mistake by the prosecution to get 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor to walk free.

Indeed, so cavalier is her attitude to securing the freedom of a man suspected of raping a child that the shocking and candid interview may tarnish her role as an advocate for women and children in the United States.

The recordings which date from 1983-1987 were discovered by the Washington Free Beacon and are of Clinton recalling her role in the most important criminal case of her career.

This is not the first time that the trial has been written about.

In 2008 at the height of her primary battle with Barack Obama, a Newsday story focused on Clinton's deeply controversial strategy of attacking the credibility of the girl.

'Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader's honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out 'older men' like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed 'Hillary D. Rodham' 'in compact cursive,' wrote Newsday.

Evidence of state-sanctioned violence raises questions about UK funding of improvements to the 'internal security sector'

Concern is mounting that British aid money may be funding police who are using rape as a tool of state-sanctioned torture against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The claims emerged during last week's Ending sexual violence in conflict summit in London hosted by the UK foreign secretary, William Hague, and Angelina Jolie.

A report from the charity Freedom From Torture (FFT), has collated medical evidence from 34 female political activists who have fled to the UK from DRC. It has found that the country's police and security personnel are systematically raping President Joseph Kabila's female opponents.

This evidence has raised questions about the UK government's programme to give more than £60m to the Congolese national police and "internal security sector" to improve its performance and accountability.

The programme, run by the Department for International Development (DfID), states: "This programme will benefit Congolese citizens through improved security and justice delivery with a special attention to women and girls."

One female political activist who fled to the UK after being detained, raped and tortured by police in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, said: "Many are raped by secret police and other security officials. When I was living in Congo I didn't see any improvement in the police. Perhaps the money from the UK government is making the police stronger so they can rape us more. While William Hague is calling for the elimination of rape as a weapon of war, his government is funding a police force that rapes with impunity."

"We bow our heads to the heroes who lost their lives for the sake of their country, to prevent the war from coming into the house of each of us", - said the Prime-Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk while expressing condolences to the families and friends of those military men killed last night near Luhansk.

"They lost their lives because they defended men and women, children and the elderly who found themselves in a situation facing a threat to be killed by invaders and sponsored by them inhumans. First, we will commemorate the heroes by wiping out those who killed them and then by cleaning our land from the evil", - he said.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk reassured that the Government of Ukraine will take care of the families and loved ones of those killed.

As the sectarian US-backed central government in Iraq loses up to half its territory to jihadist forces, the country is entering its biggest crisis in years. So far the Obama administration is resisting pressure to intervene with air strikes or drones.

This would be a useful time for the US intellectual cheerleaders of the disastrous 2003 invasion to gaze upon their handiwork and consider how high that achievement ranks in their CVs. Certainly they bear some responsibility for today's events. They acted to destabilize the country in the first place, uprooting a secular dictatorship.

But no, yesterday's Tom Friedman column about religious extremism in Iraq ignores the shooting war there and spins off into a discussion of environmental issues in the region. How soon we forget that he sold the Iraq invasion as a radical-liberal liberation! As he wrote in 2003 (thanks to Belen Fernandez):

Bolivian President Evo Morales has urged the world community to bring an end to the UN Security Council as it is not meeting its goal of securing peace between states, the Bolivian ABI agency reports.

Saturday evening, Morales opened a meeting of the Group of 77 (G77) plus China in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. According to the organizers' plans, the final document produced by the summit should become the basis for the development of a new "agenda" of the UN.

"International organizations are required, which will contribute to the development of the world, the destruction of world hierarchies, and the equality of states. Therefore, the Security Council must disappear," said Morales. Instead of ensuring peace between peoples, he believes that the UN has supported military action and aggression by "imperial powers" to acquire the resources of countries harmed by intervention.

"Today, instead of the Security Council there is the Insecurity Council, the Council of imperial intervention," the agency quotes the Bolivian leader. Earlier, Morales said that mankind should take immediate and urgent measures to save "Mother Earth" and develop a new world order within the framework of the UN. He criticized the "imperial speculative model" of world development, which, according to him, had generated an institutional crisis, caused inequality and created an unfair power structure in international organizations, including the UN, IMF, WTO and others.

There will be no more delays for Ukraine to start paying for gas it gets from Russia, gas giant Gazprom announced. After failing for months to cover its gas bill, Kiev now has to pay for any gas it wants in advance.

"This decision was taken due to systematic failure of Naftogaz Ukraine to pay. The debt of the company for Russian gas stands at $4.458 billion, including $1.451 billion for November and December 2013, and $3.007 billion for April-May 2014," Gazprom said in a statement posted on their website.

"They've paid zero. Correspondingly we deliver zero," Sergey Kupriyanov, a Gazprom spokesperson said in a press conference following the announcement.

Reuters reports that gas supplies to Ukraine were restricted off as soon as the deadline at 10:00am in Moscow passed.