The Supreme Court gave greater protection Tuesday to death row inmates seeking to prove they should not be executed because they are intellectually disabled, and ruled that laws like those in Florida and Virginia are too rigid.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that state laws that draw a bright line on IQ-test results are unconstitutional. Under those laws, an inmate who scores above 70 on the test cannot be considered intellectually disabled and cannot present evidence that he or she should not be executed.

Florida, Virginia and Kentucky have such laws, and a handful of others have similar rules. It was the court's first consideration of state laws defining mental retardation in capital cases since its 2002 decision that executing the mentally retarded violated the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joined the court's liberals in Tuesday's ruling , and said laws imposing a strict IQ test run counter to a unanimous verdict in the medical community that such scores are imprecise.

"The death penalty is the gravest sentence our society may impose," Kennedy wrote. "Persons facing that most severe sanction must have a fair opportunity to show that the Constitution prohibits their execution. Florida's law contravenes our nation's commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world."

Remember those full-body scanners that created concern among privacy advocates and members of Congress? Well, those machines were pulled from airports last year following intense criticism, leading to sighs of relief among critics who felt they were too intrusive.

But those machines, which each cost between $130,000 and $170,000, are now apparently being put to good use inside jails, prisons and government buildings, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In fact, 154 of those very same machines went to Arkansas, New York and Michigan, among other locations.

The remaining scanners are currently in a warehouse, according to the Times, but the Transportation Security Administration will continue transferring remaining units for use by government agencies.

"TSA and the vendor are working with other government agencies interested in receiving the units for their security mission needs and for use in a different environment," TSA spokesman Ross Feinstein told the Federal Times earlier this month.

The Afghan president refused to visit the Bagram military base when US President Barack Obama made a surprise visit there to meet troops on May 25. Similarly, the American president turned down a proposal for talks at Karzai's palace in downtown Kabul.

Air Force One flew all night to bring Obama from Washington, DC, to the airstrip of Kabul's international airport in Bagram.

Officially, the American president had come to the US largest military base in Afghanistan to address troops ahead of the end of Afghan campaign.

"I'm here on a single mission, and that is to thank you for your extraordinary service," Obama said in a speech before some 32,800 American service personnel, practically all of the US contingent in Afghanistan, making their probably last tour of duty to the country.

"Our combat mission [in Afghanistan] will be over," Obama said, promising that "America's war in Afghanistan will come to a responsible end."

White House officials also made an arrangement to organize a tete-a-tete between Barack Obama and the outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been stubbornly refusing to sign a security forces agreement throughout the last year of his term in office.

The Obama administration needs this agreement to justify presence of reportedly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan after the longest military campaign in American history will be officially over.

For Obama this could become the last attempt to talk Hamid Karzai into singing the security agreement, because on May 28, Afghan voters will choose between Abdullah Abdullah, the presidential candidate from National Coalition of Afghanistan, and independent candidate Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai in the runoff election for the next president of Afghanistan.

But Hamid Karzai rejected the invitation to meet Barack Obama at Bagram Airfield.

The EU parliamentary elections have seen a marked shift towards both right-wing and Euroskeptic political parties. From the National Front to UKIP, RT has drawn up a list of the need-to-know political parties coming to prominence in the EU.

The National Front

The National Front far-right party in France gleaned 25 percent of the votes in the latest EU elections, according to early results. It's well ahead of the opposition center-Right UMP party, which received 20.6 per cent - a 9 percent drop since the last elections.

Moscow and Kiev have tentatively agreed on the total amount of the first gas debt tranche that Ukraine should pay, which is 2.5 billion dollars, said Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak. The EU stressed the need for Kiev to pay its bills.

Russia and Ukraine have agreed that Kiev will partly pay its gas bills to cover supplies from November to May, inclusively, Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said after holding talks in Berlin with Gazprom Deputy CEO Aleksandr Medvedev and EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger.

"The total amount of payments can reach 2.5 billion US dollars. We are ready to continue discussing prices for gas which we deliver to Ukraine. We hope that the Ukrainian side will discuss our proposals with its leadership," Novak elaborated.

"America's Pacific Century," Foreign Policy magazine declared in an op-ed published by then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The by-line would continue by saying, "the future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action."

And indeed, it has been in the middle of the action. With an army of deeply entrenched US-funded NGOs masquerading as human rights, press freedom, and pro-democracy advocates, the US has been busy subverting and attempting to overthrow indigenous institutions across Southeast Asia either in support of US proxy regimes already in power, or to pave way for disruptive "color revolutions" seeking to install them.

The idea is to align Southeast Asia, along with India and Pakistan, as well as Korea and Japan, into three united fronts to encircle and contain China. Detailed first in the Vietnam-era "Pentagon Papers" and continuously updated over the following decades, confrontation with China is now the admitted purpose of the US "pivot."

Ukraine just had a revolution to oust sleazy oligarchs. Why is it about to elect one as its leader?

Petro Poroshenko is the Chocolate King of Ukraine. What does that mean in a country where average yearly income still hovers around a few hundred dollars a month, where pensioners are impoverished by just about any definition and where the hunger to blame someone, anyone, for the country's troubled post-Soviet path has produced not one but two revolutions in the last decade? For starters, that he lives like a king, a real one.

Poroshenko's palace is a short ride outside central Kyiv in Kozyn, a suburb that, in Soviet times, used to be a proletariat retreat, dotted with tall, slender pine trees and small wooden cabins for workers' families to enjoy the summer months by the Dnieper River. Today, a few vintage compounds with rusted metal gates remain, and dilapidated houses stand in the center of town. But the choice land close to the river has been bought up by wealthy Ukrainians who have erected mansions along its banks. Poroshenko's grand manse - complete with a white portico and columns that recall, not at all subtly, the White House, is surrounded by a yellow brick wall. Over the top, you can see rows of freestanding Roman archways, metal-leaf gates and the golden cupola of an Orthodox chapel.

Although it's technically illegal, Poroshenko and many others in the neighborhood have cut off access to the shorefront along their property. The high gates blocking the water have become a visible symbol of the excesses of a crony capitalism that has walled off much of Ukraine from the prying eyes of its people, turning land that was once for everyone to enjoy into an elite playground. "I don't like it," one of Poroshenko's neighbors told me. "But what can you do?"

By the count of those keeping score, Poroshenko is Ukraine's seventh richest man today, worth an estimated $1.3 billion, according to Forbes. A 48-year-old with a large jowl and pompadour-styled salt-and-pepper hair, he owns UkPromInvest, a mysterious holding company that has no website but boasts interests in bus manufacturing, car distribution, shipyards, banking and electrical cables, among other things. He is most famous for owning the confectionary firm Roshen, which has factories in both Ukraine and Russia and produces all manner of flashy gold-wrapped chocolate wafers, bars and candies. Perhaps even more relevantly in these troubled times, Poroshenko is also the owner of Channel 5, known as the country's main opposition television station and a leader of the revolution that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych this winter.

Someone is perjuring themselves to Federal officials and that individual(s) should enjoy a nice long sabbatical at the courtesy of the taxpayer, forgoing the staid Armani for the more robust orange jump suit.

Following SEC Chair Mary Jo White's less than credible testimony to the House Financial Services Committee on April 29 that "the markets are not rigged," Terrence Duffy, Executive Chairman and President of the CME Group which owns the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the largest futures exchange in the world, delivered the same message to the Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday.

Duffy testified that "Our market data is sent to everyone at once. While customers have several options in terms of how they can receive data from us, we do not restrict access. Having multiple connectivity options makes our markets accessible to a broader array of participants."

Russian State Duma has voted to pass a bill allowing protest voting in the country at its second and main reading. According to the current draft, the option is only allowed in municipal elections.

The bill also provides that in cases when most voters vote for none of the above the authorities must organize a re-run.

The bill was prepared and submitted to the Lower House by a group of senators headed by Upper House chair Valentina Matviyenko. The original document allowed the return of the "none of the above" option to ballots on all election levels, but this met strong opposition from Lower House MPs.

The head of the State Duma Committee for Constitutional Law, Vladimir Pligin, said during the debates that the return of a protest vote was undesirable because the objective of the elections was to form the bodies of power, not just gather information about popular preferences. At the same time Pligin admitted that the "none of the above" vote was possible at a municipal level, where the public has good personal knowledge of candidates.

Fort Greely, Alaska is home to one of America's two domestic missile defense bases. Now it's getting armored against high-altitude electromagnetic energy attacks - like the kind emitted from nuclear blasts.


It's a far-fetched scenario, but the Pentagon is spending millions on a bunker designed to protect against exactly that. According to contract documents from the Army Corps of Engineers, the military plans to spend $44 million on an "HEMP-protected" bunker housing the base's missile launch control systems.

By HEMP, the contract is referring to high-altitude electromagnetic pulses. The base at Fort Greely houses anti-ballistic missile interceptors stored in silos, and can also control and direct interceptors fired from a similar site at Vandenberg Air Force base in California.

It's worth noting the money is pocket change compared to the $41 billion the Pentagon is spending on its ground-based mid-course defense program through 2017. The plan calls for installing dozens of missile interceptors in Alaska and California.