Russia's lower house has voted against a proposed bill that would ban the promotion of all sexual material aimed at minors, with which its authors planned to amend the already existing law banning gay propaganda.

The bill containing the radical restrictions was drafted by MP Maria Maksakova-Ingebergs of the centrist conservative United Russia party, which currently holds the majority of seats in the parliament. It suggested a change in the federal law on children's rights and the one protecting children against potentially harmful information.

In particular, the MP wanted to recognize "any information that promotes the priority of sexual relations before life values, spiritual and intellectual development" as harmful for the children's health and development. The measures would be backed by fines for those publishing such concepts in the mass media, cinema and internet sites.

The Lower House committee for family women and children opposed the draft claiming that Russian legislation already had bans on distributing information products containing sexual references among minors. The committee's members also said that if the bill was passed it would practically replace the recently introduced ban on gay propaganda towards children which is undesirable as the ban was protecting the foundations of the family institution.

Reverse flows of Russian gas from some of the European countries like Slovakia and Poland are neither legal nor viable, experts tell RT. The comments follow Ukraine's claims it's going to use reverse schemes, after Gazprom cut its supplies.

On Monday, Russia switched Ukraine to a prepayment system for gas supplies, saying it wouldn't send gas directly unless it paid its $4.5 billion debt in full.

Ukraine has responded by saying it could receive up to 20 billion cubic meters in reverse flow from neighboring Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, a practice Gazprom and RT experts doubt is legal.

"It depends on the contracts between Gazprom and the European recipient. As far as we know, there is a non re-export clause that means gas received in Europe should actually be utilized in Europe for downstream purposes, it shouldn't be re-exported, there is strong legal question there," Marat Terterov, Executive Director of the Brussels Energy Club, told RT.

One of the main, and most simple stumbling blocks, is the contract itself, which doesn't allow the importing countries to redistribute the supplies as they please.

The Internal Revenue Service is about to get slapped with a harsh payback for messing around with conservative groups, blowing wads of tax dollars on employee conferences and helping implement Obamacare.

The House Appropriations Committee is set to OK an IRS budget of $10.9 billion, $1.5 billion under President Obama's request for fiscal year 2015, reducing the agency's budget to 2008 levels.

The goal is to keep the tax agency focused on its "core duties," and eliminate efforts to judge the political activities of tax-exempt groups and brake its implementation of Obamacare.

The funding is part of a larger $21 billion bill for several agencies including the IRS, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission. Noting that it cuts $2.3 billion from the president's overall request, Chairman Hal Rogers said, "the bill focuses cuts on lower-priority or poor-performing agencies, such as the scandal-plagued and inefficient Internal Revenue Service."

Aberdeen - Soon, Maryland will be the home to a couple of new landmarks. Actually, sky-marks.

As Mike Schuh reports, two large blimps will soon rise over Harford County and stay put.

Radar blimps like these have been used on the battlefield to track the enemy, and in the Caribbean to intercept drug runners.

Testing in Utah is complete. Now they're being packed up and sent to Maryland.

"There is some equipment already on grounds, yes," said Kelly Luster, a spokesman for Aberdeen Proving Ground.

What will they be looking for? Anti-ship cruise missiles, unmanned aircraft and swarming boats.

These blimps are a lot like a toy balloon. They are unmanned and are held in place by a very long tether.

Hovering over Aberdeen, some days you'll be able to see them from Baltimore.

Somali militants who murdered 48 people in a Kenyan village as they watched the World Cup went door to door asking residents if they were Muslim or spoke Somali - and shot them dead if either answer was 'no', witnesses revealed today.

The attack on the coastal village of Mpeketoni, about 30-miles southwest of the tourist centre of Lamu, came at the end of a weekend of bloodshed that has exposed the world to the shocking depravity of terrorists, apparently emboldened by each other's acts.

Witnesses told how about 30 gunmen - believed to be members of Somali terror group al-Shabaab - arrived in the town in minibuses at 8pm yesterday before bursting into residents homes, shooting dead any man they thought was not Muslim.

'They came to our house at around 8pm and asked us in Swahili whether we were Muslims,' said Anne Gathigi. 'My husband told them we were Christians and they shot him in the head and chest.'

Residents of Slavyansk and its suburbs were awoken overnight on Thursday by what they say were incendiary bombs that were dropped on their city by Kiev's military. Witnesses and local media reports suggested that the bombs might be phosphorous.

Much of the village of Semyonovka, located in the Slavyansk suburbs, was set ablaze. Local residents told RT that the ground didn't stop burning for some time.

"We all saw what happened here yesterday. They used rocket launchers as well as incendiary bombs against us. The ground was on fire. How can the ground burn by itself. It burned for about forty minutes," resident Roman Litvinov told RT over the phone.

"Starting from 2 a.m. everyone I've met has a sore throat and is coughing all the time. I think this is because of the burning. I think we'll feel the true consequences later. There are still a lot of people here, a lot of children we haven't managed to get out yet," resident Tatyana told RT.

The use of incendiary bombs - designed to start fires using materials such as napalm, white phosphorus or other dangerous chemicals - is strictly prohibited by the UN.

It is almost one hundred years since Sir Mark Sykes, an otherwise forgettable British politician, entered into an agreement with a French diplomat called François Georges-Picot (great uncle of the former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing) to carve up the Middle East after the end of the First World War.

The arrangement was kept secret, and for understandable reasons. In the United States, President Wilson was an enthusiastic advocate of national self-determination. He would have been appalled had he known that the British and French were determined to share out the remains of the collapsed Ottoman empire between them.

Of more immediate importance, Sharif Hussein of Mecca launched the Arab revolt against the Ottomans in June 1916. In return, the British had pledged the Arabs full independence, a promise that Lloyd George casually betrayed once it was over.

Though sordid and cynical, the Sykes-Picot arrangement endured far longer than anyone had a right to expect. Out of it arose the modern states of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (followed in due course by Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan).

Ninety-eight years later, however, Sykes-Picot is finally starting to collapse. Look at a map and (fortified by the notorious straight lines of the agreement) Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are all still theoretically present and correct. In practice, though, a series of spectacular events are steadily turning their maps into works of fiction.

Yesterday's fall of Mosul (ironically a key point of dispute between the French and the British 100 years ago, because oil had just been discovered there) shows vividly that Iraq as we have understood it for the past century or so no longer exists.

Examples of extreme inequality are becoming easier to find. Progressive leaders have us thinking about revolution. If a revolution is to take place, Americans - especially young Americans - need to know the facts, and they need to know how they're getting cheated, and they need to get angry. The following should help.

1. $1,000,000,000,000,000 in Sales. Not One Cent for Sales Tax

The trading volume on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) reached an incomprehensible $1 quadrillion in notional value in 2012. That's a thousand trillion dollars. In comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is $17 trillion.

On that quadrillion dollars of sales CME imposes transfer fees, contract fees, brokerage fees, Globex fees, clearing fees, and contract surcharges, many of them on both the buyer's and seller's side. As a result, the company had a profit margin higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation from 2008 to 2010, and it's gotten even higher since then.

But not a penny in sales tax for the taxpayers who provide publicly-funded infrastructure, technology, systems of law, and security to help them process billions of financial transactions.

Instead - incredibly - CME complained that its taxes were too high, and they demanded and received an $85 million tax break from the State of Illinois.

Radical Sunni militants who have been capturing cities in northwest Iraq claimed on Twitter that they executed 1,700 Iraqi soldiers. The radicals posted graphic photos as evidence.

The photographs, which were posted on the Twitter account associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL), came with captions that described their alleged massacre. They did not provide a date or location, but chief military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said the killings took place in Salahuddin province, located north of Baghdad.

Some of the images show dozens of captured men in civilian clothes loaded onto trucks, with the captions saying that they were taken to their deaths.

The 1961 Vienna Conventions on Consular Relations which entered into force on April 24 1964 and have hence been supplemented have been the guiding rules. The preeminent document governing the working of diplomatic missions around the world and clearly laying out the framework for international relations since its inception. The Vienna Conventions have proven to be one of the most respected and successful international documents in history respected and followed even during times of war. Therefore the attack on the Russian Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine is a crime of international proportion which must be condemned by the entire international community.

Ukraine has become a rogue nation acting with complete and total impunity since the armed coup in February and the installation by the western backed junta of a government made up of nazi sympathizers pretending to represent the will of the Ukrainian people while using violent brute force to silence and literally eliminate anyone opposed to their reign of terror. The previous statement is sadly not an exaggeration of the facts but an understatement as to the illegality and egregious conduct of the regime.

"Puppet" Poroshenko's Escalation

After the recent presidential election conducted by the junta which saw billionaire oligarch Petr Poroshenko placed in the office of president, it had been hoped that the government would cease its punitive military operations against the civilian population in the east and across Ukraine. However Poroshenko, who Rossiya Segodnya head Dmitry Kiselyov called a "helpless puppet" on his weekly program Vesti, has continued and even escalated the punitive war on civilians. Immediately after his inauguration the Ukrainian forces began employing heavier weapons, illegal munitions and all of the resources at their disposal including fighter aircraft.

Among the banned munitions being employed against civilian targets are cluster bombs and white phosphorous. The military is literally wiping entire villages off the face of the earth and to add to the growing list of war crimes they have refused to allow the innocent civilian population to exit the zone of conflict. With their public statements that they are engaged in a war to "clear the east" there can be absolutely no doubt that the junta is engaged in clear and undeniable genocide against the people of the east and those opposed to their illegal grab on power.