The charges are essentially grassroots corruption -- that an entrenched system in Philadelphia fixed the tickets of connected drivers while severely punishing drivers with no clout.

Nine traffic court judges, virtually everyone who wore the robe in the city's traffic court between July 2008 and September 2011, were arrested today and forced to stand on the other side of the bench and be accused by federal prosecutors of cheating the average citizen out of a fair shake.

Among them, the judges face charges of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, perjury, making false statements to the FBI, and aiding and abetting. They could be punished by 60 to 490 years behind bars and face millions of dollars in fines.

Defendant William Hird, who could face 315 years in prison and a $4.5 million fine on nearly 20 criminal counts, said only "no comment" today when leaving his arraignment. But his lawyer said the former judge was "being indicted for essentially doing his job."

A report claims Israel pressured women to reduce its poor black population. Reproductive rights need defending across the world

Should gynaecologists need to be told not to give women contraceptive injections without establishing fully informed consent? Of course not. But that is what has happened in Israel after it was revealed in a report by a women's rights organisation that Ethiopian women have been given injections of Depo-Provera without sufficient understanding of the purpose or side effects of the drug. Some Ethiopian women in transit camps were refused entry to the country if they refused the injection, and others wrongly believed they were being inoculated against disease. While Israeli demographers discuss the need to "preserve a clear and undisputed Jewish majority among Israel's total population", it may seem anomalous that women in the Jewish Ethiopian population are forced or coerced into using this highly effective contraceptive method.

However, the conclusions of the report, written by Hedva Eyal, are that the injections given to Ethiopian women are "a method of reducing the number of births in a community that is black and mostly poor".

Many people may be unaware that the Israeli case is merely the tip of a global iceberg of human rights abuses in the field of reproductive health. Forced sterilisation of people with learning disabilities and people of minority ethnic groups was documented across Europe and the US in the 20th century. Under the state of emergency in India between 1975 and 1977, thousands of men and millions of women were bribed, coerced and sometimes forced to undergo sterilisation. As recently as 1996 in Peru, a demographic policy led to a sevenfold increase in sterilisations in just two years, effected through widespread violations of women's rights. A provider explained: "Many [providers] did not inform women that they were going to be sterilised - they told them the procedure was something else. But I felt this was wrong. I preferred to offer women a bag of rice to convince them to accept the procedure and explained to them beforehand what was going to happen."

Remarks to the Jubilee Conference of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)

December 1, 2012 | Moscow, Russia - Many topics have been proposed for discussion in this session. In the brief time available to me as a panelist, I would like to put forward some thoughts about the control of narrative and the manipulation of information as an essential element of modern warfare. The Israelis call this "hasbara." Since they are without doubt the most skilled contemporary practitioners of the art, it seems appropriate to use the Hebrew word for it. And, since Israel's most recent war (against the Palestinians in Gaza) sputtered to an end just ten days ago, I'll cite a few examples from that war to illustrate my main points.

Before I get to specifics, let me provide a general description of hasbara and its purposes. Hasbara is usually translated as "explanation." That does not do the concept justice. Hasbara links information warfare to the strategic efforts of the state to bolster the unity of the home front; ensure the support of allies; disrupt efforts to organize hostile coalitions; determine the way issues are defined by the media, the intelligentsia, and social networks; establish the parameters of politically correct discourse; delegitimize both critics and their arguments; and shape the common understanding and interpretation of the results of international negotiations. Hasbara is multifaceted and well-adapted to the digital age. It embodies a public-private partnership in which the state leads and committed volunteers follow in implementing an information strategy. In its comprehensiveness and complexity, it bears the same relationship to unidimensional public diplomacy as grand strategy does to campaign plans.

Hasbara has its roots in earlier concepts of propaganda, agitprop, and censorship. Like them, it is communication calculated to influence cognition and behavior by manipulating perceptions of a cause or position with one-sided arguments, prejudicial substance, and emotional appeals. Unlike its progenitors, however, hasbara does not seek merely to burnish or tarnish national images of concern to it or to supply information favorable to its theses. It also seeks actively to inculcate canons of political correctness in domestic and foreign media and audiences that will promote self-censorship by them. It strives thereby to decrease the willingness of audiences to consider information linked to politically unacceptable viewpoints, individuals, and groups and to inhibit the circulation of adverse information in social networks.

Hagel's legislative record belies his potential role as bit player on the stage of the American empire, unlikely to wield the kind of influence suggested by the controversy over his nomination.

Ideological elements of both the Left and the Right have inflated the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense to symbolize far more than he can possibly achieve in office, good or bad. The controversy over his nomination is based on a handful of his comments and valedictory Senate addresses. His actual legislative record is a lot thinner. From my time as a Senate staffer, I do not remember any significant legislation he was personally responsible for, nor did he involve himself to any great extent in floor debates on authorization or appropriation bills having to do with national security.

His supposedly inflammatory statements on Iraq, in particular, are after-the-fact criticisms of Bush administration policy that belie his actual legislative behavior when it counted. In October 2002, after the debate on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, he dutifully lined up to vote in its favor like all but one of his GOP colleagues. Perhaps Hagel felt the Bush administration had deceived him with faked evidence, as many another Senator has claimed thereafter. But as the casualties piled up, he was not quick to join critics of the war - at least not until March 2007, four years after the invasion, when Hagel supported legislation to begin withdrawing from Iraq in 120 days. That was already after the 2006 electoral debacle for the GOP, and at the point when most thinking people had long since sought an exit strategy. He also voted for the Patriot Act that progressives and libertarians alike abhor, and for the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts which, along with the Iraq war, have left us in our present fiscal hole.

The U.S. is pursuing a self-destructive grand strategy in the Middle East. It's based on a pair of conflicting objectives, each bathed with high-toned rhetoric about promoting human rights and democracy:

- The pursuit of strategic economic advantage in the Arab states.

- Support of the consolidation of Israel.

That's the view of retired U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, who shared it in a talk at the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council Jan. 16.

Without explicitly saying so, Freeman shows how the triangle of mismatches among our words and actions and the world those words and actions purport to deal with contradict the criteria of a sensible grand strategy.

He explains how interaction is sapping the moral authority of United States, and in so doing, it is dangerously reducing our capacity for independent action. Freeman's line of argument is entirely consistent with the theories evolved by the late American strategist, Colonel John Boyd.

Freeman reveals why these self-inflicted mismatches are coming to a grand-strategic head, and - if left unaddressed - will blowback to America's detriment. There is no wasted verbiage in Freeman's text - every paragraph is a clearly-written building block in a sweeping tour de force that is worthy of your careful study.

They say you can't kill that which has never lived. It's useful advice when analyzing the persistence of the so-called "Iranian nuclear threat."

According to a report in McClatchy, "Israeli intelligence officials now estimate that Iran won't be able to build a nuclear weapon before 2015 or 2016."

Recall that just this past September Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was theatrically warning that Iran would achieve nuclear weapons capability by "next spring, at most by next summer."

Of course, Netanyahu has made a career out of warning that Iran is about to go nuclear - claiming as early as 1992 that Iran was 3 to 5 years away from being able to produce a bomb

As one Israeli official justifiably lamented to McClatchy, "Did we cry wolf too early?" Yes - early and often, to be precise.

"There has not been the run towards a nuclear bomb that some people feared," the Israeli official went on to note. "There is a deliberate slowing on their [Iran's] end."

Statements by top Iranian officials last weekend are another indication of the destabilising impact of the escalating efforts by the US and its allies to oust the Syrian regime of President Bashar al Assad. Ali Akbar Velayati, a top aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the media that "an attack on Syria would be considered an attack on Iran and Iran's allies."

The warning, the sharpest by Tehran since the civil war in Syria began, came as batteries of patriot missiles deployed by the US and NATO on the Syria-Turkey border, manned by hundreds of NATO troops, began to go operational. On Saturday, a pair of missile batteries provided by the Dutch government became active at Adana in Southern Turkey.

According to media reports, a German security official confirmed on Tuesday that the two German missile batteries, stationed near the city of Kahramanmaras, 100 kilometres from the Syrian border, also became functional as of Monday. The US government has deployed two missile batteries to the border region.

An Armenian presidential candidate has been shot in the center of Yerevan, the country's capital, late Thursday. The 64-year-old Paruyr Hayrikyan of the Union for National Self-Determination party, was taken to hospital following the incident.

Hayrikyan was taken to the Saint Gregory the Illuminator medical center with two gunshot wounds, in the shoulder and in the chest. The chest wound is considered serious, but not immediately life-threatening, medics said.

Hayrikyan is conscious but has not yet been operated on. A number of high-profile figures visited the politician in his ward, including Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, Yerevan Police Chief Vladimir Gasparyan and Speaker of Parliament Hovik Abrahamyan, Regnum news agency reports.

A Montana Republican state lawmaker wants to give criminals the option of choosing "corporal punishment in lieu of incarceration." According to Think Progress, the legislation is being proposed by Rep. Jerry O'Neil and would apply not just to misdemeanor crimes, but to some felonies as well.

The law states that "(f)or purposes of this section, 'corporal punishment' means the infliction of physical pain on a defendant to carry out the sentence negotiated between the judge and the defendant." The law states that the exact nature of that pain shall be "commensurate with the severity, nature, and degree of the harm caused by the offender."

On May 20, 2010, on a highway in West Memphis, Arkansas, a father and son armed with a handgun and AK-47 assault rifle pumped 14 bullets into a police officer who'd pulled over their minivan on a routine traffic stop. The dead cop's partner took cover in his squad car but the AK-47 sliced through it and killed him too. A county sheriff and his chief deputy responded and were also hit. The last man standing was state wildlife officer Michael K. Neal, who sped his patrol car through the carnage, rammed the minivan, and opened fire through his broken windshield with an M-4 carbine. Within minutes, the suspects were dead.

Gun control advocates held up the horrific episode as a textbook argument for banning assault rifles. Officer Neal, meanwhile, soon found himself at a Virginia meeting of the National Rifle Association, accepting its "Officer of the Year" award - and a complimentary Smith & Wesson pistol.