Top Obama administration and Pentagon officials signaled a willingness to temporarily accept China's new, controversial air defense identification zone on Wednesday. Those officials expressed disapproval for the way in which the Asian power has flexed its muscles, and cautioned China not to implement the zone. But they also carved out wiggle room in which the United States and China ultimately could find common ground on the issue, indicating that they may be willing to live with the zone for now -- as long as China backs off its demand that all aircraft traveling through it check in first.

"It wasn't the declaration of the ADIZ that actually was destabilizing," said Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, America's highest-ranking military officer. "It was their assertion that they would cause all aircraft entering the ADIZ to report regardless of whether they were intending to enter into the sovereign airspace of China. And that is destabilizing."

That's a change from just a few days ago, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden demanded that China take back its declaration of the zone. And it's another demonstration that China's recent decisions have forced the United States to tread carefully. On Wednesday, Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing for more than five hours, according to a senior administration official. In brief public remarks midway through the marathon session, Biden didn't mention the air defense zone at all.

Psychopathy is one of the most studied personality disorders. It consists of variations of 20 well-documented characteristics that form a unique human personality syndrome - the psychopath. Many of these traits are visible to those who interact with the psychopath who possess some or all of these characteristics. For some, superficial charm and grandiose sense of self make them likable on first meeting. Their ability to impress others with entertaining and captivating stories about their lives and accomplishments can result in instant rapport. They often make favorable, long-lasting first impressions. This personality disorder is a continuous variable, not a classification or distinct category, which means that not all corporate psychopaths exhibit the same behaviors.

Beneath the cleverly formed façade - typically created by psychopaths to influence their targets - is a darker side, which people eventually may suspect. They can be pathological liars who con, manipulate, and deceive others for selfish means. Some corporate psychopaths thrive on thrill seeking, bore easily, seek stimulation, and play mind games with a strong desire to win. Unlike professional athletes moved by a desire to improve performance and surpass their personal best, psychopaths are driven by what they perceive as their victims' vulnerabilities. Little research exists on their inner psychological experiences; however, they seem to get perverted pleasure from hurting and abusing their victims.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) research indicates that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing basic human emotions and feelings of guilt, remorse, or empathy.¹ This emotional poverty often is visible in their shallow sentiment. They display emotions only to manipulate individuals around them. They mimic other people's emotional responses. Some lack realistic long-term goals, although they can describe grandiose plans. The impulsive and irresponsible psychopath lives a parasitic and predatory lifestyle, seeking out and using other people, perhaps, for money, food, shelter, sex, power, and influence.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder traditionally assessed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R).² Often used interchangeably with psychopathy, the term sociopathy is obsolete and was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in 1968. Currently, there is no formal diagnosis of psychopathy in the DSM-Fourth Edition-Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR); however, it is being considered for the 2013 DSM-V list of personality disorders.

Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly "corrupt" always imply that the United States is not corrupt.

VOA reports :

While it is true that you don't typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America's political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $16 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.

1. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. House Majority leader John Boehner has actually just handed out cash on the floor of the House from the tobacco industry to other representatives.

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L'Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven't been anywhere near his house.

American politicians don't represent "the people." With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.

A missing shipment of radioactive cobalt-60 was found Wednesday near where the stolen truck transporting the material was abandoned in central Mexico, the country's nuclear safety director said.

The highly radioactive material had been removed from its container, officials said, and one predicted that anyone involved in opening the box could be in grave danger of dying within days.

The cobalt-60 was left in a rural area about a kilometer (a half a mile) from Hueypoxtla, an agricultural town of about 4,000 people, but it posed no threat or a need for an evacuation, said Juan Eibenschutz, director general of the National Commission of Nuclear Safety and Safeguards.

"Fortunately there are no people where the source of radioactivity is," Eibenschutz said.

Commission physicist Mardonio Jimenez said it was the first time cobalt-60 had been stolen and extracted from its container. The only threat was to whoever opened the box and later discarded the pellets of high-intensity radioactive material that was being transported to a waste site. It had been used in medical equipment for radiation therapy.

"The person or people who this took out are in very great risk of dying," Jimenez said, adding that the normal survival rate would be between one and three days.

Storage tanks at the Fukushima nuclear plant like one that spilled almost 80,000 gallons of radioactive water this year were built in part by workers illegally hired in one of the poorest corners of Japan, say labor regulators and some of those involved in the work.

"Even if we didn't agree with how things were being done, we had to keep quiet and work fast," said Yoshitatsu Uechi, 48, a mechanic and former bus driver, who was one of a crew of 17 workers recruited in Okinawa and sent to Fukushima in June 2012 - among the thousands of workers from across Japan who have put together the emergency water tanks and stabilized the plant after three reactor meltdowns that were triggered by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The Okinawa crew was recruited by Token Kogyo, an unregistered broker, and passed on to work at the Fukushima plant under the direction of Tec, a larger contractor which reported to construction firm Taisei Corp, records show. That practice of having workers hired by a broker but managed by another contractor is banned under Japanese law to protect workers from having their wages skimmed and to clarify who is responsible for their safety.

It was a gold-plated promise: A career in government meant a safe and sound pension, no matter what.

All that may have changed Tuesday. In a case with major implications for California, a judge in Michigan ruled that the bankrupt city of Detroit can impose cuts to its municipal pension plans.

The ruling comes as a bankrupt California city, San Bernardino, edges closer to a possible legal showdown with CalPERS over the sanctity of public employee pensions. Although the decision in Detroit doesn't directly affect what happens in San Bernardino, legal experts said it will strengthen the California city's hand as it tries to reduce its multimillion-dollar pension obligations.

In any event, the Detroit ruling was a milestone. Experts long suspected that cities could use bankruptcy to force reductions in their pension expenses, but until now they've never had a court's blessing. Other cities that filed for bankruptcy protection - notably Vallejo and Stockton - have shied away from a confrontation over the issue, choosing instead to continue making all their pension contributions.

Twelve years have passed since the US government of President George Bush made the dramatic decision to ignore half a century of international law, abrogate the Geneva Conventions and bring us to a place today where 164 men who have never been tried and 84 of whom have been cleared for release, are still in Guantanamo Bay prison.

The horror of the place cannot truly be conveyed in words. Fifteen men are being daily force fed, in contravention of medical ethics. The current hunger strike has lasted since February and at one time involved two thirds of the prisoners. Men became skin and bones, according to their lawyers, one of who has an on-going court case to get an independent doctor into the prison to assess his failing client. Violence is a daily norm with invasive body searches and manhandling of prisoners in and out of cells by special teams of heavy soldiers in body armour. Solitary confinement for many has lasted months or years. A litany of physical injuries, psychological deterioration, and illnesses caused by the conditions of the last 12 years are fully documented and are an indictment of all those responsible at every level of US government and military.

Guantanamo is the symbol of the new normality imposed on our world since that reckless Bush-era phrase was coined - the war on terror. The notorious Abu Ghraib photographs of US abuse in Iraq in 2004 had their origins in the personnel and practices authorized by the Bush White House in Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo.

Televangelist Pat Robertson on Wednesday struggled to understand why homosexuality was no longer considered a mental illness, but said that he approved of gender reassignment surgery.

In response to a viewer who asked if her gay nephew needed to pray for himself to be helped, Robertson recalled that homosexuality was considered to be a personality disorder by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973.

"A few years ago the psychiatrists, the psychologists used to say that homosexuality was a mental illness," the TV preacher remarked. "Now, the Supreme Court has said that it is a protected right."

"So what's he going to pray about? Is he going to say something is wrong and he's unhappy? And if he's unhappy and realizes he is doing something that makes him miserable, you might help him."

Robertson said that the solution was to show the gay nephew the Bible because "the Bible is explicit" that homosexuality is a sin.

A conservative Democrat who's facing a tough re-election challenge has released an ad touting his faith in the Bible.

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) is considered one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the country, in part due to his support of the Affordable Care Act and also because he's a Democrat in the Deep South.

He released the 30-second TV ad Wednesday to help shore up support among his Christian constituents in the Bible Belt, telling voters that his faith guides him.

"I'm not ashamed to say that I believe in God, and I believe in His word," Pryor says in the ad, looking directly at the camera. "The Bible teaches us no one has all the answers, only God does, and neither political party is always right."

Conservatives angered by Pope Francis' recent attacks on capitalism and wealth inequality aren't going to like hearing President Barack Obama's approval of them.

The president said Wednesday that growing income inequality had "frayed" the basic bargain at the heart of the U.S. economy during an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the White House.

"Some of you may have seen just last week the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length," Obama said. "'How can it be,' he wrote, 'that it's not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points.' But this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country. And it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people."

The president noted that the American economy had doubled in size since 1979, but most of that growth has been restricted to a "fortunate few."