Human Rights Watch accused Canada's federal police Wednesday of striking fear in the hearts of aboriginal women, offering up testimonies of alleged police threats, abuse and even rape.

The fear of police expressed by 50 women and girls interviewed in the north of British Columbia province - the focus of the HRW investigation - was comparable with what its researchers witnessed in post-war Iraq and Libya, the group said.

"The threat of domestic and random violence on one side, and mistreatment by RCMP officers on the other, leaves indigenous women in a constant state of insecurity," said Meghan Rhoad, co-author of an 89-page report on the matter.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said it took the allegations "very seriously."

But the RCMP added: "It is impossible to deal with such public and serious complaints when we have no method to determine who the victims of the accused are."

In a familiar scene of Russian daily life, Ivan Alexandrov smoked a cigarette outside a Moscow metro station as other commuters stepped out of the heavy doors and immediately lit up.

But under a draft law already passed by parliament banning smoking in public places, from next year such scenes will be a thing of the past in Russia.

If the law is passed by the upper house and then signed by President Vladimir Putin, Russia will from 2014 have European-style bans on smoking in restaurants and bars as well as long-distance trains.

The ban will even apply outdoors in a radius of 15 metres (yards) around metro stations, a tough prospect in a country where 40 percent of the adult population is believed to smoke.

"Our lawmakers forget that smokers also have certain rights and they also forget the main thing, that we smokers, at least in this country, are still 40 percent," said Alexandrov, a lawyer, smoking with a cup of takeaway coffee.

In a speech, shadow defence secretary will acknowledge shortcomings of Blair government's approach

Labour has conceded for the first time that a "primitive understanding" of the Islamic world caused some of the problems faced by the west in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warned David Cameron his response to the terrorist crisis in north Africa shows he has not learned the painful lessons from those conflicts.

In a speech on Thursday, Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, will suggest the Blair government did not appreciate what it was getting itself into after the September 11 attacks, as British forces joined the international effort to overthrow the Taliban and hunt down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

Murphy will stop short of saying Labour was wrong to have supported the invasions, but will say Cameron is in danger of ignoring lessons from the past in his analysis of the jihadist threat in Mali and Algeria.

In particular, he will criticise the prime minister for a speech in which he said the UK faces a "generational struggle" against Islamist-inspired terrorism in the region.

"Some of the political language applied in response to recent events has suggested a natural continuation of the 9/11 world and in turn the strategy then deployed," Murphy will say.

A former LAPD officer has written a manifesto sympathizing with Christopher Dorner, the fugitive ex-LA cop who has declared "war" on the LAPD.

"The 1st thing I would say to [Dorner] is, I feel your pains!," Joe Jones wrote in his manifesto, circulated Tuesday by hacker group Anonymous and posted to Jones' Facebook. "But you are going about this the wrong way. To take innocent lives could never be the answer to anything. I say this as a Man who experienced the same pain, betrayal, anger, suffering, litigation and agony that you did in many ways."

Jones, 48, was a patrol officer for nine years, retired in 1998 and now has an event-planning company in LA, the LA Weekly reports. It appears that Jones' Facebook may have been disabled hours after posting his manifesto (see full manifesto below).

He expressed his condolences for Dorner's victims as well as victims of "the injustices of Police Corruption, Scandal, Lies, Deception and Brutality."

Jones said he himself has been a victim of such corruption. "I need you to first assume that I would not surface 16 years later with lies about a situation that has me with PTSD to this very day," he wrote. "The pain forces me to speak as I have yet to shake the Ill's of my experience as an LAPD Officer."

Bangkok: Exercise Cobra Gold - the United States military's largest exercise in the region - is underway in Thailand.

Cobra Gold, the largest and oldest multilateral military exercise in the Asia-Pacific, began as a US-Thai bilateral exercise more than 30 years ago.

It has now expanded to include regional partners as well and joining in this year are Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, said: "Cobra Gold now is not what it used to be. In the Cold War, it was an anti-communist front. After the Cold War in the first two decades or so, it was more a confidence building project designed to promote military cooperation and maintain stability.

"But in the last two, three years, it has taken on a new face. It has become an US vehicle for engaging the region in military terms but also to keep some checks on China's assertiveness."

Since 1982, Cobra Gold has been hosted by Thailand, a key US ally. Over the years, the region has lost the attention of the US because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But with the US pulling out of both countries, their recently announced and much-discussed pivot towards Asia could see an increased engagement in Southeast Asia in military terms.

As the Lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina during Yugoslavia's War of Extermination against the Bosnians, I represented all 40,000 raped Women of Bosnia, argued their case for genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the World Court of the United Nations System), and won two World Court Orders of Provisional Measures of Protection on their behalf on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. See my book "The Bosnian People Charge Genocide!" (1996).

The Pope and his Cardinals and his Archbishops and his Bishops are ultimately responsible for the widespread and systematic Sexual Abuse of thousands of completely innocent children around the world, which constitutes a Crime against Humanity under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, in particular article 7(1)(g) - "rape" - and article 7(1) (k) - "Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health." According to the well known principle of Command Responsibility under International Criminal Law, the Pope and his Cardinals and his Archbishops and his Bishops should all be prosecuted for their own criminal acts and the criminal acts of their subordinate priests for the reasons set forth in Rome Statute article 28(b):

The fog of chatter about Federal Reserve money-printing shenanigans, currency wars, fiscal intransigence, exchange rates, and alphabetized rescue operations conceals the central reality of the historical moment: that all industrial economies now face epic contraction, even rip-roaring China in its absurd and spectacular bid to become the latest drive-in utopia.

The so-called advanced nations of the world are all sliding toward something less than they wish to be, and the so-called developing nations will backslide further into poverty and anarchy where development will never happen. The implacable contraction underway is the simple result of growing scarcity of cheap oil, the master resource.

Thus, in a world where fantasy has replaced analysis, the propaganda channels brim with false news of America's coming "energy independence" and the rebirth of domestic manufacturing, the coming electric car fleet, and space tourism.

There is also chatter among the paranoid that an imagined elite has deliberately engineered American collapse for fun and profit, with sideshows about the Department of Homeland Security promoting social upheaval in order to make a show of putting it down. This is all b.s. concealing the futile machinations of people so unfortunate as to hold political office in an unraveling they can't control. Where control is no longer possible, paranoid fantasies fill the vacuum of wishing for control.

Prosecutors always expand laws far beyond their intent. Attorneys in civil cases do the same. For example, the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was passed in order to make it easier for the government to convict members of the Mafia. However, the law, despite its intent, was quickly expanded by prosecutors and attorneys and used in cases against pro-life activists, Catholic bishops, corporations accused of hiring illegal immigrants, and in divorce cases. "Junk bond king" Michael Milken, a person with no ties to organized crime, was threatened with indictment under the RICO Act. Prosecutors have found that the asset freeze provision in the Act is a convenient way to prevent a defendant from being able to pay attorneys and, therefore, makes it easier for prosecutors to coerce innocent defendants into a guilty plea.

We are now witnessing the expansion of Obama's Kill List. The list began under the Bush regime as a rationale for murdering suspect citizens of countries with which the US was not at war. The Obama regime expanded the scope of the list to include the execution, without due process of law, of US citizens accused, without evidence presented in court, of association with terrorism. The list quickly expanded to include the American teen-age son of a cleric accused of preaching jihad against the West. The son's "association" with terrorism apparently was his blood relationship to his father.

As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote, the power of government to imprison and to murder its citizens without due process of law is the certain mark of dictatorship. Dictatorship is government unconstrained by law. On February 10 the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama dictatorship now intends to expand the Kill List to include those accused of acting against foreign governments. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an "Algerian militant" accused of planning the January attack on an Algerian natural gas facility, has been chosen as the threat that is being used to expand Obama's Kill List to include participants in the internal disputes and civil wars of every country.

If the Obama regime is on the side of the government, as in Algeria, it will kill the rebels opposing the government. If the Obama regime is on the side of the rebels, as in Libya, it will kill the government's leaders. Whether Washington sends a drone to murder Putin and the president of China remains to be seen. But don't be surprised if Washington has targeted the president of Iran.

The Houston City Council passed an ordinance meant to help track down criminals who try to resell stolen valuables. Gold-buying businesses will now be required to photograph and fingerprint sellers as well as photograph the items that are being sold to the dealer.

Torture doesn't necessarily have to deal with physical pain. The US military have used Christian heavy metal music by the band Demon Hunter after rockers Metallica asked they stop using their recordings on prisoners.

The US Navy SEAL involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden told Esquire magazine that prior to using Demon Hunter recordings, the commandoes used Metallica music to pull information out of Iraqi prisoners.

"When we first started the war in Iraq we were using Metallica music to soften people up before we interrogated them," the spokesperson said.