Chief Ramsey has been a national leader in militarized policing.

Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey, one of two co-chairs apppointed by President Obama to head a commission on ways to demilitarize local police, is known for leading repeated bloody and abusive crackdowns on protesters when he was Washington, D.C.'s chief a decade ago, according to a civil rights attorney who won millions in damages for 100s of citizens attacked by D.C. police.

"If the president's idea of reforming policing practices includes mass false arrests, brutality, and the eviscerating of civil rights, then Ramsey's his man. That's Charles Ramsey's legacy in D.C.," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), speaking of the ex-D.C. chief and current Philadelphia Police Commissioner. "Obama should immediately rescind his appointment of Commissioner Ramsey, who is a mass violator of civil rights and civil liberties."

On Monday, Obama appointed Ramsey and Laurie Robinson, a George Mason University professor of criminology, law and society, to head a commission that the president said will suggest steps that the executive branch can take to unwind the most visible aspects of America's militarized police - its domestic use of military gear.

"They are going to co-chair a task force that is not only going to reach out and listen to law enforcement, and community activists and other stakeholders, but is going to report to me specifically in 90 days with concrete recommendations, including best practices for communities where law enforcement and neighborhoods are working well together," Obama said Monday, continuing, "How do they create accountability; how do they create transparency; how do they create trust; and how can we at the federal level work with the state and local communities to make sure that some of those best practices get institutionalized?"

Obama's focus on militarized policing is sparked by the overly aggressive response by St. Louis area departments to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, this past summer and fall after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown. Those protests were broken up by police SWAT teams in battle dress, the use of tear gas, and other outsized and disproportionate surplus military weaponry that is distributed across America through a mix of Pentagon and Department of Justice programs.

US - Russia relations have deteriorated severely in the past decade and they are about to get worse, if the House passes H. Res. 758.

NATO encirclement, the US-backed coup in Ukraine, an attempt to use an agreement with the European Union to bring NATO into Ukraine at the Russian border, a US nuclear first-strike policy, are all policies which attempt to substitute force for diplomacy.

Russia's response to the terror unleashed by western-backed neo-nazis in Crimea and Odessa came after the local population appealed to Russia to protect them from the violence. Russia then agreed to Crimea joining the Russian Federation, a reaffirmation of an historic relationship.

The Western press begins its narrative on the Crimea situation with the annexation, but completely ignores the provocations by the West and other causal factors which resulted in the annexation. This distortion of reality is artificially creating an hysteria about Russian aggressiveness, another distortion which could pose an exceptionally dangerous situation for the world, if acted upon by other nations. The US Congress is responding to the distortions, not to the reality.

Large multinational corporations are behind the majority of documented bribes worldwide, with most payers and takers hailing from rich nations, according to a study released Tuesday by the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The report, which evaluated data obtained from 427 bribery offense cases spanning the past 15 years, found that 57 percent of all bribes examined involved corporate efforts to obtain public contracts - mostly in western, more developed states. Customs and defense officials accounted for a significant proportion of bribe recipients, at 11% and 6% respectively.

According to the study, the average bribe amounts to 10.9% of the total value of the transaction, with the average payout calculated at nearly $14 million for the cases reviewed.

Western media trumpets ridiculous claims by a comically obscure "think-tank" that is loaded with pro-NATO politicians

What I wanted to talk about today is the emergence of a disturbing meme - that whenever aircraft of the Russian Air Force conduct sovereignty patrols or reconnaissance flights, they endanger civil aviation.

This notion has been floated by several sources lately, and it is bulls***.

The first I noticed it (more accurately, it was brought to my attention) was a month ago, at the end of October.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Tuesday that he would be calling early elections, firing two of his key ministers prior to the dissolution of the Knesset and suggesting they were plotting a putsch against him.

Netanyahu fired Finance and Justice Ministers Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni respectively, saying that they had "harshly attacked" both himself and the coalition government.

In a televised statement on Tuesday evening, Netanyahu said that "from within the current government, it is impossible to lead a state."

Netanyahu accused Livni and Lapid of playing "old politics" and claimed that they had conspired against him.

"Something Lapid and Livni have in common in their leadership is grandiloquent statements about new politics. But in effect they are part of the same old politics," he said. "In recent weeks they attempted to entice the ultra-Orthodox parties into deposing the prime minister while sitting in government."

In comments shortly after a meeting on Tuesday he also criticized the current coalition government.

"I will no longer tolerate an opposition within the government. I will not tolerate ministers who, from within the government, attack government policies and the person who leads the government," he added.


"If the unprecedented behavior of some government ministers continues, there will be no choice but to go to elections again," Netanyahu said in a statement after an hour long meeting, reported Haaretz.

The unarmed Mike Brown was shot dead by officer Darren Wilson after an altercation over Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson, walking in the middle of Canfield Drive, Ferguson, Missouri.

Canfield Drive is not exactly a major thoroughfare, with locals reporting that walking in the street was commonplace among youths of the area. In addition, it was Saturday morning and there was little if any traffic on the road.

According to Ferguson police chief, Wilson did not know that Brown had recently stolen some cigars from a local store.

Without stopping his vehicle, Wilson approached the two young men in his Police SUV and said something to them about walking in the middle of the road.

According to Wilson's testimony he said: "Hey guys, why don't you walk on the sidewalk?" To which one of the two responded: "We're almost at our destination." So Wilson claims he tried again: "But what's wrong with the sidewalk?"

If the conversation had continued in this way, we might expect to hear that Wilson then said something like: "Aw shucks guys, I'd really really appreciate it if you would do me the honor of walking on the sidewalk, after all, I'm just trying to look out for you because I really love you both so much".

It's been called contraceptive corn and spermicidal corn. A San Diego company called Epicyte developed it.

Here's a brief backgrounder from The Guardian, Sept. 9, 2001; "GM corn set to stop man spreading his seed," by Robin McKie:

"Scientists have created the ultimate GM crop: contraceptive corn. Waiving fields of maize may one day save the world from overpopulation.

"The pregnancy prevention plants are the handiwork of the San Diego biotechnology company Epicyte, where researchers have discovered a rare class of human antibodies that attack sperm.

"By isolating the genes that regulate the manufacture of these antibodies, and by putting them in corn plants, the company has created tiny horticultural factories that make contraceptives.

"'We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies,' said Epicyte president Mitch Hein.

"...The company, which says it will not grow the maize near other crops, says it plans to launch clinical trials of the corn in a few months."

Five NFL players of the St. Louis Rams made the "hands up, don't shoot" gesture before a Sunday game against the Oakland Raiders in a show of support for nearby Ferguson and other cities across the US, where people have been protesting against the grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown.

The Rams players have been both praised and severely criticized for the gesture, which also sparked intense debate on social media.

Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Kenny Britt, Jared Cook and Chris Givens were the ones who raised their hands during pregame introductions. Protesters frustrated over police brutality and unfair sentencing, disproportionately affecting ethnic and racial minorities in the US, have used the gesture since Wilson, a white police officer, killed Michael Brown in August. According to some claims, the African-American teenager raised his hands in a sign of surrender before he was fatally shot. Others say Brown charged at the officer instead.

At a Bundestag meeting, Deputy Head of the Left Party's faction Sahra Wagenknecht sharply criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel's policy toward Russia The MP accused the Chancellor of following instructions from Washington and neglecting national interests.

"Ms. Merkel, there is something that you consider to be more important than the interests of German business: that is the interests of the American government and American business," the MP said.

According to Sahra Wagenknecht, Angela Merkel is responsible for drawing the country into a new edition of "cold war" with Russia. Moreover, she is outraged at Merkel's cooperation with the Ukrainian regime, in which the police and security service functions are performed by people who are reliably attested as Nazis.

"Instead of dealing with these thugs, we need a foreign policy, for which the security and peace in Europe can be more important than Washington's instructions. Get back on the path of diplomacy, and cancel the sanctions. Stop playing with fire!" she said.

According to Wagenknecht, Angela Merkel has forsaken the policy of détente and led Europe into a new cold war, because, according to the MP, the Chancellor does not have enough courage to confront the US government.

Western attacks on Russian media vary from the abusive to the merely sarcastic, but what all of them have in common is the attempt to define the English language Russian media as a "propaganda instrument" of the Russian government.

The Ukrainian crisis has triggered an extraordinary series of attacks on the English language Russian media by the Western media. Here in Britain, where I write, hardly a day has passed in the past few weeks without the Russian media coming in for some sort of attack.

These attacks vary from the abusive to the merely sarcastic, but what all of them have in common is the attempt to define the English language Russian media as a "propaganda instrument" of the Russian government (always portentously called "the Kremlin").

The primary target is the Russian media's coverage of the Ukrainian crisis. US Secretary of State John Kerry has even called RT a "propaganda bullhorn" because of it.

There are many ways to define "propaganda", but most people would agree that it involves disseminating information in a way that is misleading and biased so as to influence opinion in a particular way. Doing so can involve an element of outright lying, but in my experience the most common and effective way is to omit or minimise important facts so as to make a correct understanding of an issue or situation impossible.