The crisis in Ukraine was caused by the blatant interference of the United States and the European Union in its affairs, Russian Permanent Representative to the OSCE, Andrei Kelin, said on Monday.

"The Ukrainian crisis was provoked by the US and EU interference. It was the United States that grossly but customarily interfered in Ukraine's internal affairs, breaching the Helsinki principles and the UN Charter," Kelin said at the Warsaw Human Dimension Session of the 2014 OSCE Review Conference.

"It was the United States that encouraged the state coup in Kiev in February and the punitive operation in the east of the country, which left 3,000 people killed and made hundreds of thousands flee their homes," the diplomat said.

Jund al-Khilafa, an ISIS-aligned militant group in Algeria, released a video Wednesday allegedly showing the beheading of Hervé Gourdel, a French tourist it held captive and threatened to kill if French President Francois Hollande didn't withdraw from the U.S.-led coalition of airstrikes in Iraq. The jihadists reportedly released the video on Twitter, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors terrorist chatter.

The 4-minute, 46-second video, titled "A Message with Blood to the French Government," features footage of Hollande. Gourdel is shown on his knees speaking as men wrapped in headscarves and carrying guns stand behind him. SITE said the footage doesn't show the actual beheading, but another shot shows Gourdel's severed head resting on his lap before the men hold up his head.

The video is similar to the beheadings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines at the hands of ISIS. SITE said Jund al-Khilafa has taken cues from the group, now known as the Islamic State."As the Islamic State has instructed its supporters all over the world to execute attacks, the beheading of this French hostage may not be the last demonstration of this nature," said SITE Director Rita Katz.

Russia's State Duma plans to widen legal protection for people who help fight corruption among state officials, reporting the cases to police or the media. The bill is currently in the works, Izvestia reported.

The amendments to the existing anti-corruption law have been suggested by MP Ilya Kostunov, of United Russia, who's a member of the lower house of parliament's security and anti-corruption committee.

According to Kostunov, many people who report cases of corruption within their work environment are forced to quit their jobs by their bosses. The new bill should help protect these people, the deputy says.

"There is a presidential decree that enacts protection for those who report corruption cases. According to this decree, anti-corruption fighters can only be fired by a prosecutor's order, and they should also be guaranteed free legal assistance. But these rules are widely being flouted," Kostunov said.

The U.S. today began bombing targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.

That means that Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama - after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.

The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).

It was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad's enemies while politely informing his regime of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters it that it be at war, always and forever.

Among the many evils of monetary central planning is the conceit that 12 members of the FOMC can tweak the performance of a $17 trillion economy on virtually a month to month basis - using the crude tools of interest rate pegging and word cloud emissions (i.e. "verbal guidance"). Read the FOMC meeting minutes or the actual transcripts (with a five-year release lag) and they sound like an economic weather report. Unlike the TV weathermen, however, our monetary politburo actually endeavors to control the economic climate for the period immediately ahead.

Accordingly, the Fed is pre-occupied with utterly transient and frequently revised-away monthly release data on retail sales, housing starts, auto production, business investment, employment, inflation and the like. But its always about the latest ticks in the data - never about the larger patterns and the deeper longer-term trends.

And of course that's the essence of the Keynesian affliction. The denizens of the Eccles Building - -overwhelmingly academics and policy apparatchiks - -rarely venture into the blooming, buzzing messiness of the real economic world. They simplistically believe, therefore, that the US economy is just a giant bathtub that must the filled to the brim with "aggregate demand" and all will be well.

Filling the economic bathtub is accomplished through something called "monetary accommodation", which essentially means credit expansion. That is, market capitalism left to its own devices is held to have an inherently suicidal tendency toward depression - or at least chronic recessions and underperformance. As the Keynesians have it, households and businesses almost always spend too little and therefore need to be induced to become more exuberant in the shopping aisles and on the factory floor.

In this framework, the blunt instrument of artificially depressed interest rates is the natural policy tool of choice. If cautious households are saving too much for a rainy day or even their children's education or their own retirement - - why then club them with ZIPR (zero interest rates). Get them shopping until they drop. Likewise, if businessmen are too benighted to see the case for opening another store or buying a new lift truck for their warehouse (or expanding same), bribe them with cheap debt financing.

Russia's state-owned nuclear company Rosatom has signed a historic partnership agreement with South Africa to build a large-scale nuclear power plant in the African state and develop collaboration in other areas of nuclear industry.

The deal was signed on the sidelines of the 58th session of the International Atomic Energy Agency General Conference in Vienna on Monday.

"The Agreement lays the foundation for the large-scale nuclear power plant (NPP) procurement and development program of South Africa based on the construction in RSA of new nuclear power plants with Russian VVER reactors with total installed capacity of up to 9,6 GW (up to 8 NPP units)," said a joint statement published on Rosatom's webpage.

Besides the nuclear power plant construction, the two countries agreed to develop comprehensive collaboration in other areas of nuclear power industry - including the construction of a Russian technology-based multipurpose research reactor and assistance in the development of South African nuclear infrastructure.

Founder of the controversial private security contractor Blackwater claimed Friday that the organization could have successfully combated militant group Islamic State if the Obama administration had not "crushed my old business."

Erik Prince said in front of the conservative group Maverick PAC that his infamous private military firm - synonymous with the contracting bonanza that ensued after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 - would have effectively fought Islamic State (known as ISIS or ISIL), allowing the US to hold back its military in its offensive against the group's strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

"It's a shame the [Obama] administration crushed my old business, because as a private organization, we could've solved the boots-on-the-ground issue, we could have had contracts from people that want to go there as contractors; you don't have the argument of US active duty going back in there," Prince said during the discussion with retired four-star Gen. James Conway. "[They could have] gone in there and done it, and be done, and not have a long, protracted political mess that I predict will ensue."

Nearly two weeks ago, President Obama said the US would conduct airstrikes and "hunt down" the fighters of the Islamic State jihadist group in Iraq, Syria, and "wherever they exist." Washington has promised $500 million to so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels for fighting both the Syrian government and Islamic State militants. While the US has also sent 1,600 "support force" troops to advise the Iraqi military in the fight against Islamic State, Obama has stressed - despite contradicting sentiments from Pentagon officials - that ground troops will not be necessary during the latest offensive.

Following the US President's speech at the UN, Russian FM Sergey Lavrov was puzzled with Barack Obama's ranking of international threats: deadly Ebola virus top, followed by so-called Russian aggression and ISIS in Syria and Iraq only third?

Gathered at the UN headquarters in New York, the world leaders attending the 69th General Assembly heard Barack Obama highlighting the three most significant global threats today.

"As we gather here, an outbreak of Ebola overwhelms public health systems in West Africa, and threatens to move rapidly across borders. Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition. The brutality of terrorists in Syria and Iraq forces us to look into the heart of darkness," the US leader said at the beginning of his statement.

Reacting to the speech, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke with astonishment.

"We earned the second place among the threats to international peace and stability," Lavrov told journalists on the sidelines of the UN assembly.

Not only the ranking of international threats seemed bizarre to Lavrov, especially in the light of the current strikes in Iraq and Syria that bypassed the UN mandate, but also Obama's certainty that the world has become "freer and safer."

"I didn't understand whether he was serious or not and whether there was an Orwellian element in it. Because George Orwell invented the Ministry of Truth and it looks like this philosophy is lingering."

Alex Salmond has raised the prospect of Scotland becoming independent without going through another referendum.

The First Minister, who is due to step down in November, said that a vote like last week's is "only one of a number of routes" that could be taken.

He said that although a referendum was his preferred option, achieving a majority at the Scottish Parliament was another way of reaching his party's goal.

Mr Salmond's comments came as another senior party member, former deputy leader Jim Sillars, said on Twitter that a majority for the SNP in the 2016 Holyrood election would be enough to declare ­independence.

Mr Sillars tweeted: "Let Yes assert new indy rule - no more ref - majority votes and seats at Holyrood 2016 enough." He later added: "What's this about a waiting a generation - indy remains on agenda now".

President Barack Obama presented a four-pronged approach to battling violent extremism from the likes of the Islamic State on Wednesday and pleaded with the international community for assistance during an address at the United Nations.

From the UN headquarters in New York City, Pres. Obama asked member states and the rest of the world to come together in order to combat the Islamic State - also known as ISIS, or ISIL - in the midst of a months-long campaign of violence in the Middle East that in recent days and weeks has been met with military strikes from the United States and its allies.

Speaking at first generally of what he referred to as the dangers posed by religiously motivated fanatics such as members of Al-Qaeda, Pres. Obama soon after set his sights specifically on the Islamic State and asked his audience in the General Assembly to consider a blueprint that aims to eradicate those groups by first eliminating ISIS before taking a broader approach intended to curb the creation of similar factions in the future.

"As an international community, we must meet this challenge with a focus on four areas. First, the terrorist group known as ISIL must be degraded, and ultimately destroyed," Obama said.

"No God condones this terror," he added. "No grievance justifies these actions. There can be no reasoning - no negotiation - with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death."

Comment: The coalition of the killing. No reasoning or negotiations required.