Before any investigation into the MH17 crash even started, Western politicians and the media were quick to pin the blame for the tragedy on Russia. The parts of the story that do not support the theory seem to have been simply disregarded.

A UN Security Council resolution, unanimously adopted on Monday, urges a "full, thorough and independent international investigation" into the MH17 crash.

But for some it's already clear who is to blame.

"...this is a direct result of Russia destabilizing a sovereign state, violating its territorial integrity, backing thuggish militias and training and arming them," British Prime Minister David Cameron wrote.

"What's happening is really grotesque and it is contrary to everything President Putin and Russia said they would do," US Secretary of State John Kerry said on NBC television.

"Russian-controlled territory, Russian-backed rebels, quite likely a Russian-supplied weapon - Russia can't wash its hands of this," Australian PM Tony Abbott believes.

Western mass media, so sure of the Kremlin's hand in whatever bad things happen in Ukraine, has lately switched from calling anti-government forces in the east of the country pro-Russian to plainly Russian separatists.

Finally! The Russian military has decided to speak out about some of what it knows about what happened to MH17. It was a typical Russian event: the interpreters were nothing short of *terrible* (I speak as a former military interpreter myself), the visual aids were badly designed (the shape of a SU-24 bomber was used to represent a totally different SU-25 close air support aircraft), and there was no Q&A. See for yourself:

The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither "concrete facts" nor "irrefutable evidence" to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.

The "March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance," a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government's secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place "entire categories" of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to "nominate" people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as "fragmentary information." It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.

Over the years, the Obama and Bush Administrations have fiercely resisted disclosing the criteria for placing names on the databases - though the guidelines are officially labeled as unclassified. In May, Attorney General Eric Holder even invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent watchlisting guidelines from being disclosed in litigation launched by an American who was on the no fly list. In an affidavit, Holder called them a "clear roadmap" to the government's terrorist-tracking apparatus, adding: "The Watchlisting Guidance, although unclassified, contains national security information that, if disclosed ... could cause significant harm to national security."

The massive investment in neuroscience undertaken by the U.S. BRAIN project and its sister initiative the Human Brain Project is increasingly taking a turn toward the examination of mental health. In fact, hundreds of European scientists working on the project are threatening a boycott because of this direction.

In their view, the initial directive was to be more focused on repairing organic injuries and disorders such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and physical brain damage sustained in accidents. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would be one area that might involve the military.

However, there is a disturbing trend developing in law enforcement and medicine to use what has been learned about the human brain in order to adopt pre-crime systems and predictive behavior technology.

But could a brain scan become standard procedure to see which troops might be inclined to commit insider attacks?

Troops overseas have been working alongside Iraqi and Afghan troops for years, but a new interest is being taken in evaluating potential extremists who are infiltrating to kill from within.

A right-leaning Israeli rabbi has issued a religious ruling stating that the total destruction of Gaza is justified if military leaders consider it necessary. Rabbi Dvor Lior is considered to be one of the most extreme far-right religious leaders.

Lior wrote that during any war where the Jewish people deem themselves to be under attack, they are legally allowed to fight back against the nation from which the attack came from.

"Therefore, in a time of war, the attacked nation is permitted to punish the enemy population with whatever measures it deems proper, like blocking supplies or electricity. It may bomb the entire area based on the judgment of the war minister and not wantonly put soldiers at risk," he wrote, adding that "deterrent measures to exterminate the enemy" are allowed, Haaretz reported.

Time Warner has changed its bylaws to prevent an unwanted takeover in the future. The move comes after the CNN parent company turned down an offer to be bought out by Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch last week.

The Time Warner board, led by CEO Jeff Bewkes, voted unanimously to remove a provision in the company bylaws that allowed shareholders to call special meetings. The change prevents shareholders from combining their holdings to reach the 15 percent threshold and call a meeting, the Financial Times reported. The bylaws now say that only the CEO or a majority of the board can call a special meeting.

The move delays action by Time Warner investors until its annual meeting in June 2015, a person familiar with the change told Bloomberg.

"They want to keep tighter control of the flow of the process so they are not overwhelmed if something happens that they don't like," Hal Vogel, CEO of Vogel Capital Management, told Variety.

Murdoch's 21st Century Fox conglomerate offered Time Warner $80 billion for the company in late June - a deal which would have awarded the octogenarian from Australia the third largest broadcasting and cable company in the world in terms of revenue.

The Obama administration, detailing what it called evidence of Russian complicity in the downing of a Malaysian airliner, on Tuesday released satellite images and other sensitive intelligence that officials say show Moscow had trained and equipped rebels in Ukraine responsible for the attack.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials cited sensors that traced the path of the missile, shrapnel markings on the downed aircraft, voiceprint analysis of separatists claiming credit for the strike, and a flood of photos and other data from social-media sites.


The officials also for the first time identified a sprawling Russian military installation near the city of Rostov as the main conduit of Russian support to separatists in Ukraine, describing it as a hub of training and weapons that has expanded dramatically over the past month. The officials said that tanks, rocket launchers and other arms have continued to flow into Ukraine even after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which killed 298 civilians.

Analysts at the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are continuing to examine information about the crash, but the officials said the intelligence assembled in the five days since the attack points overwhelmingly to Russian-backed separatists in territory they control in eastern Ukraine.

Russia handed all of its Defense Ministry's data on the Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine to the European Union, but has seen no reaction yet, Russia's envoy to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov said Wednesday.

"We handed it [data] on Tuesday, as soon as we got it in writing in Russian and English. We forwarded it to all the people concerned," Chizhov told journalists in Brussels.

"There has been no reaction so far," Chizhov added.

Russia's Defense Ministry revealed on Sunday its information on the situation in the Donetsk Region ahead of the Boeing 777 crash last Thursday. The presented data raised questions for Kiev, as it showed an unusual activity of Ukrainian combat forces on the day of the tragedy, a Buk missile system placed near the territory held by independence supporters, and a military plane that approached the Malaysian airliner just before the crash.

The presented data has so far caused only the US reaction with the US authorities questioning the claims Russia made.

"[The reaction] was rather predictable - they [the US] questioned the Russian data. It is their right. But if they are in doubt, they should have presented their own evidence, which they haven't done so far. Let me add that Americans have never presented factual proof in such situations, calling their information surveillance, which can discredit sources if revealed, and so on," Chizhov said.

The envoy recalled the scandal the United States found itself in 1988, when a US missile cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians, as it mistook the plane for a military aircraft. At that time, then US President George Bush Sr. said, "I will never apologize for the United States - I don't care what the facts are."

The Christians United for Israel want nothing less than total victory.

July 20 was the 13^th day of Israel's Operation Protective Edge, and the deadliest. On the morning of July 21, as they trickled into the annual Christians United for Israel conference, the mostly American supporters of the Jewish state walked past muted TVs blaring the latest damage reports from this-or-that foreign correspondent. More than 100 Palestinians died in one day; more than 445 Palestinians since the operation started.

The supporters of CUFI moved up the convention center escalators and took their seats for a plenary session. Onstage were the first guests, all recognizable from Fox News - Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol, onetime CIA director James Woolsey, and the Council on Foreign Relations fellow Elliott Abrams, a presidentially pardoned veteran of foreign policy disasters on two continents. Sitting right next to them was John Hagee, the burly Christian Zionist pastor who founded CUFI in 2006 He leaned into a microphone, passionately explaining why supporters of Israel should not be tricked by casualty reports.

"Since July 8, more than 1,000 rockets have been launched into Israel by Hamas from Gaza," said Hagee, who speaks with a captivating rumble that could make a brunch order sound like a lost gospel. "Two-thirds of Israel's population has had to run to bomb shelters, having 90 seconds to save their lives."

The objective of Hamas, said Hagee, "is to win the media war with dead civilians. We've come to Washington to ask our government to stop demanding for Israel to show restraint."

The Obama Administration's narrative of Russian guilt in the Malaysia Airlines MH17 downing is unraveling like a cheap sweater tonight, under the increasing realization that dubious social media-sourced evidence is essentially all there is, and the admission by US intelligence officials that there is no real evidence pointing to Russia at all.

What is now being euphemistically called "major evidentiary and legal obstacles," but would more correctly be called "completely full of holes," it is quickly becoming a case study in why random videos you found on YouTube are not a great way to build a case in a major international incident.

Take the photograph released over the weekend on social media, showing the putative 9k37 Buk that shot down the plane just hanging out in the middle of a quiet square in a rebel town. It would be pretty damning, if true, but it also would raise a lot of questions, chiefly why the rebels left the vehicle in such a conspicuous place during an alleged coverup.

The photo, like YouTube videos claiming to be the rebels confessing to the shoot-down but built on content created a day before the plane crashed in the first place, was quickly labeled "unable to be verified," and with deeper digging seem probable forgeries.

People who have been on social media for more than a few minutes know how much nonsense is presented as absolute truth there, and the Obama Administration's decision to base its entire case on stuff they read there, going to the extent of arguing with a dubious press, has clearly not served them well.