Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank and JP Morgan Chase are reportedly sitting on $130 million in insurance checks for thousands of victims of Hurricane Sandy, and are simply refusing to issue them, and no one knows exactly why. (A total of $208 million in insurance checks are still outstanding.)

At this point it's really difficult to say what the banks have to do to get into enough trouble that someone finally holds them accountable for their actions.

The recent Libor fines are a start, but between the banks fleecing unemployed Americans, gaming the tax system (after being saved by those very taxes), and singlehandedly creating the economic crisis, it's hard to argue with Matt Taibbi when he says the banks aren't just too big to fail, they're "too crooked to fail."

As if all of the above weren't bad enough, now the banks are holding on to $208 million that is supposed to help people rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

If the murder of Oscar Grant on an Oakland transit platform marked the dawn of the Obama era, the cold-blooded murder of former Naval reservist and Los Angeles Police officer Christopher Dorner might just mark the end of whatever optimistic hope people can muster in his administration. Whether an innocent young man just trying to get home, shot in the back after being racially profiled and slurred, or a man driven to his breaking point after being fired from a similar police force that operates according to its own warped morality and overarching objectives, the state of the union is a powder keg whose wick has gotten shorter due to decades of looking the other way.

Just minutes before Barack Obama began his state of the union address, San Bernardino County Sheriffs, knowing full well what they were doing, burned Christopher Dorner to death. From police brutality and racism to political unaccountability, from lack of economic opportunities to the extrajudicial murder of anyone deemed an enemy of the state, Dorner's life and death offers us a much clearer picture of the state of this union than last night's speech or media commentary.

In the years between the murder of Oscar Grant and Dorner's last stand, March of 2009 to be specific, we were among those observing the case of Lovelle Mixon in Oakland, a parolee who decided he was not going to return to prison, opening fire on police at a traffic stop, killing two. Police went in to execute Mixon, not expecting that he would be holding an SKS. Two more cops died as a result. The logic of Dorner's desperation, and the chain of events that led to his ultimate death, parallels Mixon's; proud men without hope, cornered, deciding to go out fighting.

Neither man was a self-understood revolutionary and it would be inaccurate (or perhaps too accurate a reflection of the dearth of revolutionary activity in contemporary society) to try and declare otherwise. However, the material conditions that produced Dorner, as with Mixon, are not uncommon. The meaning and the effects of their actions speak volumes about the depth of racialization, criminalization and hopelessness in Obama's supposed "post-racial" America.

The former US ambassador to Islamabad on Wednesday criticized Washington's "callousness" over the killing of Pakistani troops as he called for both nations to rethink how they see each other.

Cameron Munter served as ambassador during some of the most difficult times of the turbulent US-Pakistan relationship including the slaying of Osama bin Laden and a US border raid that killed 24 Pakistani troops in November 2011.

Munter, who resigned last year, said that the United States had shown a lack of generosity over the deaths of the 24 troops. Pakistan shut down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan until the United States apologized seven months later.

"The fact that we were unable to say that we were sorry until July cost our country literally billions of dollars," Munter said, pointing to the costly shift to sending supplies for the Afghan war via Central Asia.

"But worse than that, it showed a kind of callousness that makes it so difficult simply to begin to talk about those things, that I've always tried to stress, that we have in common," he said at the Atlantic Council, a think tank.

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.