A leftist MP is urging changes to the law that would bar people convicted of corruption from official posts and receiving increased pensions.

MP Oleg Mikheyev of the Fair Russia parliamentary caucus told reporters that the new bill concerns those who commit crimes "against the state authority, the interests of civil service and the interests of municipal power bodies." The politician further explained it meant bribery and graft. The bill also bans the employment as civil servants of anyone who had been sentenced to five or more years in prison for economic crimes.

"Officials must completely lose the opportunity to capitalize on their posts," the MP said.

The politician said the authors of the bill had based it on the experience of Singapore, and added that it had practically extinguished corruption using such methods.

According to the present rules civil servants receive increased pensions - the bonus for 25 or more years of service can reach 70 percent of average salary of the last working year.

The FBI has been ordered to investigate allegations that claim the agency intimidated a witness and compelled him not to testify at a recent trial over evidence related to the Oklahoma City bombing.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, US District Judge Clark Waddoups scheduled a November 13th hearing on the matter, in which Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue accused the FBI of threatening to eliminate a former undercover agent's health benefits if he took the stand. The former agent reportedly knew convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The core of the issue is that Trentadue claims the FBI has surveillance video revealing McVeigh carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing with an accomplice. The FBI adamantly denies that such video exists, and the government has insisted repeatedly that McVeigh acted alone in the event that killed 168 people.

The witness involved in this whole situation, John Matthews, was scheduled to testify regarding this alleged video in July, but withdrew at the last minute. Trentadue - as well as a freelance journalist named Roger Charles - stated that when he spoke with Matthews about his absence, the former agent told them the FBI threatened him.

"He was told he should take a vacation and that if he did testify he should suffer from a case of the 'I don't remembers,'" Trentadue told the judge back in July, as quoted by local Fox 13 News.

Russia Beyond the Headlines: There has been repeated speculation, particularly in the Western media, that Russian troops could be deployed in Ukraine and even that they have already crossed the border into Ukrainian territory. Is such an action possible in your view?

Sergei Lavrov: Unfortunately, the mass media continue to spread rumours, distorted information and even outright lies. Recently there were claims by Ukraine that its artillery destroyed an armoured column that had allegedly crossed from Russia into Ukraine, and the British media even said they witnessed the incursion. No evidence, however, was presented, and even the U.S. State Department could not confirm the incident. We view all such stories as part of an information war.

RBTH: But a real war is happening on the ground. What can Russia do to resolve this crisis?

S.L.: Our stand is crystal-clear - we want peace in Ukraine, which can only be attained through broad national dialogue in which all regions and all political forces of the country must participate. This is what Russia, the US, the EU and Ukraine agreed in Geneva on April 17. At the recent meeting in Berlin of the foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine, no one objected to confirming the Geneva Statement. The point is for Kiev to stop war games and to abandon the illusion that the deep crisis in Ukraine can be resolved by winning the war against your own people. It is deeply saddening that the US and the EU continue blindly to support anything Kiev does.

Let's recall another document that Kiev and the West try to forget. On February 21, an agreement on settling the crisis was signed by Viktor Yanukovych, Arseni Yatsenyuk, Vitali Klitschko and Oleg Tyagnibok and witnessed by the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland. They now say the agreement "has been superseded by events" because [former Ukraine president] Mr. Yanukovych left the country. But let me remind my colleagues that the February 21 agreement listed as the number-one priority the commitment to a government of national unity. Does this goal depend on the personality of Mr. Yanukovych? Isn't national unity a universal principle for any country that wants to stay whole? Instead of honouring this commitment, the opposition leaders staged an armed coup and publicly declared they had created a "government of the winners". Unfortunately, the logic of "winner takes all" remains the thrust of Kiev's actions, resulting in thousands of victims among civilians, hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons, as well as an almost totally destroyed social infrastructure in many cities and towns in eastern Ukraine.

The Western media have proven for all to see that it comprises either a collection of ignorant and incompetent fools or a brothel that sells war for money.

The conclusive evidence is the media story of the armored Russian column that crossed into Ukraine and was destroyed by Ukraine's rag-tag forces that ISIS would eliminate in a few minutes. British reporters fabricated this story or were handed it by a CIA operative working to build a war narrative. The no longer reputable BBC hyped the story without investigating. The German media, including Die Welt, blared the story throughout Germany without concern at the absence of any evidence. Reuters news agency, also with no investigation, spread the story. Readers tell me that CNN has been broadcasting the fake story 24/7. Although I cannot stand to watch it, I suspect Fox "news" has also been riding this lame horse hard. Readers tell me that my former newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which has fallen so low as to be unreadable, also spread the false story. I hope they are wrong. One hates to see the complete despoliation of one's former habitat.

The media story is preposterous for a number of reasons that should be obvious to a normal person.

The first reason is that the Russian government has made it completely clear that its purpose is to de-escalate the situation. When other former Russian territories that are part of present day Ukraine followed Crimea, voted their independence and requested reunification with Russia, President Putin refused. To underline his de-escalation, President Putin asked the Russian State Duma to rescind his authority to intervene militarily in Ukraine in behalf of the former Russian provinces. As the Russian government, unlike Washington or the EU governments, stresses legality and the rule of law, Russian military forces would not be sent into Ukraine prior to the Duma renewing Putin's authority so to do.

War criminals awaiting trial at the detention center operated by the International Criminal Court in The Hague are treated better than detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, The New Republic reported Tuesday.

"The legal requirements for the detention facilities at The Hague and at Guantanamo are identical, but the conditions of imprisonment are nothing alike," Jessica Schulberg, an investigative reporter for The New Republic, said.

A comparison of the two detention centers carried out by Schulberg shows major differences in the treatment of detainees.

While prisoners at The Hague are free to move around in the building from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. and use the kitchen, gym, library and spiritual room, inmates at Guantanamo's Camp Seven, the most secure camp in the detention center, are only allowed to spend four hours a day in a recreation room, accompanied by one other prisoner. Solitary confinement also prevents detainees from engaging in group prayer, an important part of Islam.

Guantanamo also forbids visits and phone calls, while The Hague permits visits and even assists prisoners' families with travel expenses when needed. Detainees at The Hague are also allowed to make phone calls and send letters. Guantanamo inmates may send letters as well, but communication is slow and limited, Schulberg writes.

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves."―D.H. Lawrence

No matter what your perspective on the showdown between locals and law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri, there can be no disputing the fact that "local" police should not be looking or acting like branches of the military.

Unfortunately, in the police state that is America today, we're going to find ourselves revisiting Ferguson over and over again. Every time an unarmed citizen gets shot by a police officer who is armed to the hilt, or inclined to shoot first and ask questions later, or so concerned about their own safety, to the exclusion of all else, that everything becomes a potential threat, we'll find ourselves back in Ferguson territory again.

Here's the thing, though: whether or not it ever gets reported, whether it incites any protests or marches or showdowns of epic proportions, whether it elicits any outrage on the part of the citizenry, Ferguson is already happening over and over again, all around us.

It's happening in small towns and big cities alike every time a citizen gets stopped and frisked for no better reason than they "look" suspicious. It's happening on the nation's highways and byways, where corporate greed disguised as road safety is making a hefty profit off of drivers who have the misfortune of passing a red light camera or a speed camera or a license plate reader. It's happening in the privately run jails, which are teeming with prisoners doing time for nonviolent crimes that should have landed them with a slap on the wrist and a fine instead of hard time and forced labor.

It's happening in our airports and train stations and shopping malls, where menacing squads of black-garbed, jack-booted, up-armored soldiers disguised as law enforcement officials are subjecting Americans to roving security checkpoints, allegedly in the pursuit of terrorists. And it's happening in the schools, where the school-to-prison pipeline is fully operational and busy churning out newly minted citizens of the American police state who have been taught the hard way what it means to comply and march in lockstep with the government's dictates.

Young Alex Stone didn't even make it past the first week of school before he became a victim of the police state. Directed by his teacher to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of fictional Facebook statuses, Stone wrote, "I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business." Despite the fact that dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to school administrators, who in turn called the police.

Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko shook hands as talks between the Eurasian Customs Union, EU and Ukraine began in Minsk. The crisis in eastern Ukraine is likely to dominate the agenda, with Poroshenko calling on the forum to accept his peace plan.

Putin and Poroshenko greeted each other with a handshake as they met in the Belarusian capital at the start of talks on the Ukrainian crisis.

In the opening statement, Russia's president said that Moscow is interested in not only maintaining its cooperation with Ukraine, but even expanding it.

However, Putin expressed doubt that the two countries will be able to achieve this goal in case of Kiev's association with the European Union gets enacted. Moscow will be forced to implement countermeasures if this happens, he added.

"We do not want to discriminate against anybody," he said. "We are simply going to implement a standard trade regime regarding Ukraine - the same, which is used in relations between Russia and the EU."

Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko stated the goal of his visit is to do everything possible to stop bloodshed in the country's restive east and begin process of finding a political compromise. The effective means for that is establishing good border controls, he noted.

Poroshenko also called on the meeting to accept his peace plan for Donbass, a historical name for Ukraine's eastern provinces.

"I am convinced this plan remains relevant today and would be an effective means to stop the bloodshed and to start rebuilding Donbass," he said, pledging to take the interests of the people living in the region into account.

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a "Google-like" search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

The Supreme Court of California has ruled that a suspect's silence can be used as evidence of guilt during trial.

The 4-3 decision reversed an appellate court's ruling and reinstated a man's felony conviction for a 2007 vehicular manslaughter case. That case involved a motorist named Richard Tom, who broadsided another vehicle while speeding in Redwood City.

Following the collision, Mr. Tom chose to remain silent when confronted by police. While "the right to remain silent" is traced back to the Fifth Amendment and has received longstanding legal acceptance, courts have recently moved to curtail that right by claiming that a suspect must verbally invoke a condition of silence for the legal protection to apply, prior to the reading of the Miranda warning.

In other words, the burden rests on the suspect to indicate when he or she is exercising such a right. For example, a suspect must announce, "I'm going to remain silent now," or "I am hereby invoking the Fifth Amendment" during police questioning for legal protection of silence to apply. Without specifically stating an intention to remain silent, prosecutors may portray the defendant as guilty for simply saying nothing.

This is of course ridiculous. The yahoos are running roughshod on everything a normal healthy human being could or would hold sacred. The right to silence should be absolute.


That's what happened in Mr. Tom's manslaughter trial. Since he did not specifically invoke the Fifth Amendment, prosecutors exploited his silence by telling jurors that the defendant callously refused to ask about the injured parties; attempting to portray the behavior of a reckless and remorseless killer instead of a person exercising his rights (and standard legal advice).

At his 2008 trial, Mr. Tom was convicted of gross vehicular manslaughter. A San Mateo Superior Court judge said that Tom's apparent lack of concern was relevant to the issue of criminal recklessness.

Mr. Tom went on to appeal the decision and in March 2012, California's Third District Court of Appeal ruled that the testimony violated Mr. Tom's Fifth Amendment rights because "post-arrest, pre-Miranda silence" could not be used as substantive evidence of guilt in a trial.

However, the appeal was overturned in August 2014 when the California Supreme Court issued its decision in The People v. Tom.

Islamist forces are fighting their way into western Syria from bases further east, bringing forward the prospect of US military intervention to stop their advance. If Isis, which styles itself Islamic State, threatens to take all or part of Aleppo, establishing complete dominance over the anti-government rebels, the US may be compelled to act publicly or secretly in concert with President Bashar al-Assad, whom it has been trying to displace.

The US has already covertly assisted the Assad government by passing on intelligence about the exact location of jihadi leaders through the BND, the German intelligence service, a source has told The Independent. This may explain why Syrian aircraft and artillery have been able on occasion to target accurately rebel commanders and headquarters.

Syrian army troops are engaged in a fierce battle to hold Tabqa airbase in Raqqa province, the fall of which would open the way to Hama, Syria's fourth-largest city.

Further north, Isis has captured crucial territory that brings it close to cutting rebel supply lines between Aleppo and the Turkish border. The caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June already covers the eastern third of Syria in addition to a quarter of Iraq. It stretches from Jalawla, a town 20 miles from Iran, which the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga are trying to recapture, to towns 30 miles north of Aleppo.

The question of possible US military action in Syria, such as air strikes, jumped to the top of political agenda on Thursday when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, General Martin Dempsey, said: "Can they [Isis] be defeated without addressing that part of the organisation that resides in Syria? The answer is no."