The AP has sued the US Department of Justice over the FBI's refusal to provide public records on a case when the agency created a fake news story to trap a suspect. A former FBI agent told RT that respect for the First Amendment is falling in the agency.

The Associated Press filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia along with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, AP reported on Thursday. It follows last year's disclosure, revealed by another Electronic Frontier Foundation request, of how the FBI had tricked a 15-year-old boy, who later pleaded guilty to making bomb threats, with the help of a fake article.

The lawsuit concerns a 2014 Freedom of Information request to obtain documents in the case of a 15-year-old boy who was suspected of making bomb threats to his school in the state of Washington. The FBI decided to send a web link to the MySpace profile of the suspect which led to a fake article on a bogus Seattle Times website. By clicking on stories with headlines such as "Bomb threat at high school downplayed by local police department" and "Technology savvy student holds Timberline High School hostage," the teenager infected his computer with surveillance software that helped reveal his location and Internet address.

The possibility of a new peace deal agreement that could improve the situation in Eastern Ukraine is off the table, says Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko, as a contact group meeting in Minsk ended with a proposal to ensure a stable ceasefire.

The existing peace deal is good enough and simply needs to be implemented, said Poroshenko at a press conference in Brussels accompanied by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.


The Trilateral Contact Group for Ukraine came to agreement to end all military operations and ensure a ceasefire along the whole contact line by September 1 at a meeting in Minsk on Wednesday. The matter is especially important now with the new school year just around the corner.

Information on the location of all educational facilities close to the contact line will be available to both sides, OSCE special envoy Martin Sajdik told journalists in Minsk. Moscow hailed the proposal.

The North Caucasus district military court on Thursday sentenced the former mayor of Dagestan's capital Makhachkala, Said Amirov, to life in jail for terrorism, a TASS correspondent reported from the courtroom.

"Amirov's guilt has been proved. On several counts, by applying cumulative punishment the court finally ruled to sentence Amirov to life imprisonment," the judge said.

The judge said Amirov will serve his sentence in a high-security penal colony. The other defendants were jailed to between 9 and 22 years, the judge said. Among them is Amirov's nephew Yusup Dzhaparov and also Magomed Akhmedov. The court ruled to increase the time they will spend in jail to 18 and 11 years, respectively.

Amirov, who had been the mayor of Dagestan's capital for 15 years, was arrested in June 2013 on suspicion of having organized a contract killing. In July 2014, the court sentenced him to 10 years behind bars for a plot to assassinate his political rival by shooting down the man's plane with a Strela 2M anti-aircraft missile.

According to investigators, the defendants were involved in organizing a terrorist attack, attempt at life of an acting head of a territorial investigative authority and also other severe crimes.

Despite the opposition of the US public and lawmakers to NSA surveillance, the courts keep handing the Obama administration the license to snoop. A US appeals court just threw out a 2013 verdict against the NSA, to White House approval.

The decision vindicates the government's stance that NSA's bulk surveillance programs are constitutional, the White House said Friday.

Three judges at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the plaintiffs, Larry Klayman and Charles Strange, had no standing to file the original claim, since they could not prove the NSA actually collected any of their records. While Klayman and Strange objected that the NSA refused to provide the evidence, the judges said that was working as intended.


"Plaintiffs complain that the government should not be allowed to avoid liability simply by keeping the material classified. But the government's silence regarding the scope of bulk collection is a feature of the program, not a bug," Judge Stephen F. Williams wrote.

Dollar is over-valued and has to come down. Look for the market to wake up to that when the Fed doesn't raise interest rates as expected and inevitably sends the US currency tanking

Everyone expects an interest raise in 3-6 months time. It's not happening

Seeing how at this very moment ruble is getting hammered by the dollar predicting a ruble appreciation seems like a very bold statement indeed. However, if one contrarian investor is right that is exactly what we should expect.

Peter Schiff is a financial analyst who made his fame and fortune by going against the grain. He is most known for having predicted and warned about the housing bubble and the financial crisis of 2008. Broadly speaking he is bearish on US economy and the US dollar and bullish on commodities, gold, foreign stocks and foreign currencies.

He would sum up his position something like this:

The much vaunted US recovery since the 2008 crash has not been real. Economy and disposable income of most people have not improved significantly, or at all, since then.

As such the gains made by US stock markets are not based on the state of the US economy. They are the outcome of loose money policies of the US Federal Reserve.

More than 200 people are feared dead after two boats full of migrants sank in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya.

The tragic scenes have become commonplace in the country, which western governments only four years ago claimed was a striking example of successful foreign intervention.

Authorities are continuing their efforts to retrieve bodies from the water after the vessels capsized shortly after leaving Libya's coastal city of Zuwara, en-route to Italy.

The political and security situation in Turkey is becoming increasingly worrying as it deteriorates behind a jumble of acronyms that few could possibly hope to understand. Were it not for the associated terror facing millions of Turks, Kurds and Syrians, it might seem comical. Sadly, however, there is nothing remotely amusing about this particular alphabet soup.

A prime example of how misleading headlines, confusing language and loosely employed acronyms was evident on August 12, 2015, when the UK Newspaper The Telegraph published the following:

"Turkey suffered one of its bloodiest days in recent weeks on Monday as Kurdish insurgents launched deadly attacks in different parts of the country, including the US consulate in Istanbul, killing nine people and leaving 11 wounded in ensuing clashes with Turkey security services."

Last month, in a task almost as difficult as Diogenes' search for one honest man, the U.S. allegedly found a staggering 60 'moderate rebels' in Syria to train in its interventionist program to oust Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad 'war against the Islamist terrorists'. This crack team of 'moderate' fighters, trained by the U.S. amid thousands of similarly-motivated terrorists of the Islamic State/al-Nusra/Free Syrian Army variety, demonstrated their valor by immediately refusing to fight Al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front in Syria, a dangerous hesitation because they were subsequently attacked by al-Nusra fighters anyway.

As news of the group's uselessness reached Washington at the beginning of August, Obama then pledged airstrikes in Syria to defend said 'rebels', even from 'attacks' carried out by the legitimate authorities in Syria. The airstrikes began a couple weeks ago, launched from NATO bases in Turkey, thus opening a second front of air raids against Syria from the north, following over a year of NATO airstrikes from Iraq 'against Islamic State targets' in both Iraq and Syria's southern flanks. The massive bomb attack in late July at a Kurdish political youth meeting in Suruc, southern Turkey - allegedly carried out by 'ISIS' from Syria - the day before the Turkish air force joined in US bombing raids against targets in northern Syria, is also extremely suspect. I think we can reasonably suggest that internal political opponents were targeted by Erdogan's neo-Ottomanist regime, and their deaths used to justify cross-border air raids against Kurds in northern Syria.

Turkey's perfidy in all this needs to be underscored. Syria-based analyst Thierry Meyssan reckons the Russian alternative gas pipeline route to Mediterranean Europe - 'Turkish Stream', signed between Putin and Erdogan last December - is dead in the water. Indeed, Gazprom suspended related construction contracts in early July, before halving the gas transit capacity slated in the original deal. Turkey's official stance regarding Crimea's secession to Russia is that it "will never recognize Russia's annexation." Ankara has also been dangling massive loans to the Kiev regime and hosting a Crimean Tatar lobby group convention, attended by Kiev's foreign minister, and calling for Russia to 'return Crimea to Ukraine'.

The economy is collapsing and the stock market is crashing... again. Is this crash the big one, or is it just another hiccup on the slow road to certain doom? Should we stampede, or should we continue to graze?

For those who've shouldered the responsibility of understanding how our government and economy truly work, this new, latest economic collapse, is not in any way unexpected, but rather a predictable certainty in a long train of abuses by government and Wall Street. You see, the economic system is designed to fail. Collapse is in its DNA.

At its core, our fiat-based, reserve-currency, derivates-driven, interest rate-manipulated economy is a criminal enterprise that is explicitly designed to fail at offering human kind an equitable, just and common-sensical way to facilitate exchange. However, it is very well designed to transfer wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest of the world's elite in crisis after financial crisis until the whole thing collapses. It is engineered to implode.

The Korean Peninsula faced a new standoff between the North and South along the Demilitarized Zone conducting a complicated environment. On Aug. 20, North and South Korean forces exchanged fire across the inter-Korean border. The South has also raised its military readiness alert to its highest level, "Jindogae 1″.

The latest exchange comes as tension is high on the Korean Peninsula, following the maiming of two South Korean soldiers by a land mine on August 4 as they were conducting a patrol inside the South Korean half of the 4-kilometer-wide Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, that separates the two countries. Seoul accused North Korea of infiltrating the DMZ and planting the mine. Also, the South Korea began anti-North propaganda broadcasts from a number of towers along the border.