The Association of European Businesses (AEB), a Moscow-based business lobby, said that new US sanctions against Russia have a more severe effect on European than on American business.

The AEB says it "regrets" the US sanctions, and warns that they will stunt economic growth "not only in Russia".

"These sanctions are more focused on the partners of European businesses than on the partners of American companies," the group said in a statement on Thursday.

The US economy is much more isolated from Russia than Europe, which has much closer business ties with its neighbor. The AEB statement warned that sanctions will backfire and will hurt economic growth "not only in Russia, but also in Ukraine and in the EU.

The White House unveiled new sanctions against Russia targeting companies and institutions in the defense, energy and banking sectors of the Russian economy on Wednesday.

In its view, Russia hasn't done enough to de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine.

Russian state-owned finance and energy companies Gazprombank, Vnesheconombank (VEB), Rosneft, and Novatek all came under sanctions. The US also extended sanctions to defense sector companies the Almaz-Antey Corporation and the Kalashnikov Group, made famous for its production of the AK-47.

The AEB says that these businesses "are reliable and long-term partners of many European companies."

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the new sanctions would push US-Russia diplomacy to a "dead end", and warned of the sanctions' boomerang effect.

On Thursday, when a Malaysian Airlines plane was apparently shot down over Ukraine, a Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft missile battery was operational in the region, the Russian Defense Ministry said, contradicting Kiev's statements.

The battery was deployed at a site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner, the ministry said in a statement. It said radiation from the battery's radar was detected by the Russian military.

"The Russian equipment detected throughout July 17 the activity of a Kupol radar, deployed as part of a Buk-M1 battery near Styla [a village some 30km south of Donetsk]," the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said the radar could be providing tracking information to another battery deployed in the region, which was at a firing distance from the plane's flight path.

Earlier Kiev said it could not have fired a missile at the passing civilian plane because it had no Buk missile launchers deployed in the region. At the same time the Ukrainians said the militias had no Buk systems in their hands, according to a statement from the country's Prosecutor General.

After the Russian ministry came out with the statement, Bogdan Senyk, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reiterated Kiev's position, saying that "anti-aircraft missiles have not been deployed during the anti-terrorist operation ... they are all in place."

The other day at the Texas driver's license center, while paying for my required in-person renewal, the clerk said it was time to take my fingerprints.

What?

Really. Quietly, earlier this year, the Texas Department of Public Safety began requiring full sets of fingerprints from everyone who obtains a new driver's license or photo identification card. This applies to those who come in as required for periodic renewals, but it doesn't apply to mail-in renewals.

The Watchdog won't let this change go unnoticed. Previously, DPS took only a thumbprint.

Until now, if a person never got arrested, most likely his or her fingerprints would never get recorded and placed in a government database.

Some occupations, such as those in law enforcement, the military and medical care, require fingerprints. But under the new system, everybody who has a driver's license - as they cycle through their 12-year in-person renewal requirement - will be fingerprinted. Your grandmother will be fingerprinted, along with your 16-year-old new driver.

A computer lab staffed by students in an Israeli university is playing a key role in the war of information in the Gaza conflict.

Inspired by the role of social media during the Arab Spring and boosted by the support of the Israeli government and Israel Defence Force, student volunteers at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, a private university north of Tel Aviv, are waging their own propaganda war countering online anti-Israeli sentiment.

Staffed by approximately 400 student volunteers the project which goes by the name "Israel Under Fire", claims to have succeeded in closing anti-Israeli pages on Facebook and challenging propaganda from Hamas, the organisation that governs the Gaza Strip and whose military arm is firing rockets at Israel.

According to Igal Raich, a 23-year-old IDC student who volunteers in what is called "The Advocacy Room", the project aims to counter what is perceived as a false representation of Israel in international and social media through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

"It is run by students who are all volunteers," said Raich, who grew up in Canada before moving to Israel to study and also served in the Israeli military. "The school gave us a computer lab to work from and from nine in the morning until eight at night it is constantly full with student volunteers."

It has been common knowledge to anyone paying attention within the alternative news community for years, but once again the media is now admitting that the US military and intelligence agencies are indeed running massive propaganda campaigns that cover a vast array of online networks.

How many times now has such 'conspiracy nonsense' now been reported years later by the mega media as undeniable fact? In the case of the US intelligence propaganda machine that even the New York Times has covered in an article entitled 'The Real War on Reality', we are seeing just that. The New York Times report goes on to detail information uncovered from hacked data regarding the military operation to stage 'grassroots' responses and organizations in order to deceive via psyop. Professor of philosophy Peter Ludlow writes for the Times:

"The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a "persona management" system - a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities ("sock puppets") for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm."

This cyber warfare is clearly not just in the capacity of 'improving international reputation' as military commanders are claiming on record (just like there is 'no such thing' as domestic spying and it's only for terrorists). Instead, we're talking about running a major network of computers that are constantly running code specifically written to post to social media and news comment pages. Something that was revealed all the way back in 2011 by RawStory and brushed off in the name of national security by the military.

In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, which will oversee the programme, confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to "strengthen Israeli public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information consumption".

The government's hand is to be invisible to the foreign audiences. Daniel Seaman, the official who has been planning the effort, wrote in a letter on 5 August to a body authorizing government projects that "the idea requires not making the role of the state stand out and therefore it is necessary to adhere to great involvement of the students themselves, without political linkage or affiliation".

Step one: But they have the vote

Start with fragmentation. When talking about Israel refer to a mythical state that existed between November 1966 and June 1967, the only period during which the majority of Palestinians living under Israeli control were NOT subject to military rule. Focus on the fact that Palestinians who became Israeli citizens have the right to vote. Not quite a right to vote for any party of their choice (various radical lists were disqualified over the years) but still, a right to participate in the elections.

In the process, ignore the 80% of the original inhabitants of the territories that became part of Israel in 1948, who have been physically excluded from exercising any civil and political rights in their homeland. Ignore all those who live under military occupation in the 1967 territories, with no right to vote in Israel and no say in the way their territories are governed by Israel (their own government has no power over land, water, roads, housing, development, population registration, and virtually everything else that is relevant to their lives).

Go back to those citizens (about 15% of all Palestinians) and assert how fortunate they are. Do not bother to read, convey, and consider their own feelings, words, analyses, politics. They have a very different opinion on the applicability of the notion of apartheid to their own situation, but why listen? Who is better qualified to speak on their behalf than you?

The BRICS summit in northeast Brazil has already made history for one key reason; the creation of the New Development Bank.

Call it the Global South antidote to that structural adjustment racket, the IMF. Over and over again, BRICS member nations and others have insisted on an institutional IMF reform that would recognize the economic weight of the Global South. Reform packages have been languishing in the US Congress since 2010. And once again they were blocked last April.

The New Development Bank will be way more democratic than the US/EU-controlled IMF. Look at the funding; a flat $10 billion contribution by each member country. This means, sooner or later, that other developing nations will also join. I have called it casino capitalism versus a productive capitalism model.

The summit agenda was humongous; the BRICS discussed trade, sustainable development strategies, macroeconomic policy, energy, finance, terrorism, climate change, regional security, drug smuggling, transnational crime, the industrialization of Africa. The BRICS are already advancing a slew of strategic multilateral projects in terms of setting up an alternative network infrastructure; for instance, the BRICS cable, currently being laid from Vladivostok to Shantou, Chennai, Cape Town and Fortaleza (where the summit took place). The BRICS cable is all about IT security, technology transfer, commodity turnover - and facilitating financial operations. Crucially, the cable bypasses the US.

While there are various questions that have already emerged from what was supposed to be Ukraine's "slam dunk" proof confirming Russian rebel involvement in today's MH-17 tragedy, perhaps one just as gaping question emerges when one looks at what is clearly an outlier flight path in today's final, and tragic, departure of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777.

Perhaps the best visualization of what the issue is, comes from Vagelis Karmiros who has collated all the recent MH-17 flight paths as tracked by Flightaware and shows that while all ten most recent paths pass safely well south of the Donetsk region, and cross the zone above the Sea of Azov, it was only today's tragic flight that passed straight overhead Donetsk.

There's something deeply ugly, verging on mendacious, about this eye-witness account of the strike against four children on Gaza's beach by William Booth in the Washington Post. It begins with what appears to be context but is, in fact, simply an effort to deflect criticism from Israel and blame the victims.

He starts with this: "It is not unusual for militants to launch rockets from sites near my hotel."

So had rockets been launched from the spot where the children were killed? Here's the account of veteran Guardian/Observer correspondent Peter Beaumont:

The building that was hit was just a shipping container next to where one of the kids' father keeps his boat and stores fishing nets. The kids were just playing hide and seek there. They shoot missiles (against Israel) from this neighborhood but none from that location.

So how is Booth's introduction relevant in any way to the story? Yes, militants have fired rockets from the neighbourhood (after all, from where else but "neighbourhoods" are they likely to fire rockets in one of the most densely populated places on earth). But, as Beaumont points out, they were not being fired from the area that was attacked by Israel.

Israel is supposedly using precision missiles. So this was deliberate targeting of that area, an open area from which no rockets had been fired and where children regularly play. If Booth believes that rockets fired from the general area somehow justify Israel's missile strikes on the children (and if not, why mention it?), then why the hell is he staying in the al-Deira hotel, which is presumably as likely to be hit as the harbour where the children play?

There is also something unpleasant in his style of writing here. Note this line as the injured children are brought to his hotel.

Two young terrified kids were bleeding and injured, and they were quickly bandaged on the floor of the terrace, where guests usually eat skewers of grilled chicken, suck on water pipes and watch the sun go down.

That incidental reference to the chicken and water pipes is added for colour. It's a journalistic technique we use when there's not much happening and you want to set a scene to draw the reader into the story. But here it's entirely unnecessary. The action - the bleeding children and the dead bodies nearby - are what will draw the reader in, as any rookie journalist would know. So when I see Booth pausing from his description to talk about how the guests entertain themselves in the evenings, I sense - both as a journalist and a reader - that his attention is not fully on the events at hand.

I'd like to believe this is his way of responding to the shock of the events he's just witnessed. But I suspect something else is at work here, something revealing about the business of journalism.

Most of the time, we write not for ourselves or our readers but for our editors - in short to keep our jobs. Here Booth was called on to stop being the careerist and connect with his humanity. That, rare though it is in journalism, was what the moment required: to see, really see the desperate, terrified little boys in front of him. Instead, all he could think about was technique and what his editors might want.

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books)