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.

The American Embassy in Baghdad plans to evacuate a substantial number of its personnel this week in the face of a militant advance that rapidly swept from the north toward the capital, the State Department announced on Sunday.

The embassy, a beige fortress on the banks of the Tigris River within the heavily secured Green Zone, where Iraqi government buildings are also situated, has the largest staff of any United States Embassy.

The exact number of people being evacuated from Baghdad - the American government prefers to say they are being "relocated" - was not disclosed. But the embassy will remain open, and most of its staff will remain, according to the State Department.

The United States has a staff of about 5,500 at the embassy and at two consulates in the north and south of Iraq.

"Some additional U.S. government security personnel will be added to the staff in Baghdad; other staff will be temporarily relocated - both to our consulate generals in Basra and Erbil and to the Iraq Support Unit in Amman," Jordan, Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

You have stated on your website and confirmed in an interview with the BBC that "We (presumably that's you as prime minister and President Bush) didn't cause the Iraq crisis." The main cause of what is happening in Iraq today is, you said, the "predictable and malign effect" of the Western failure to intervene in Syria. And you are calling for unspecified intervention in Iraq. I presume you mean drone and other air attacks - war without American and British boots on the ground.

I think the leaders of all the major powers are to be condemned for allowing the slaughter and destruction in Syria to proceed, so I agree that intervention to stop it was needed. The question is - what form should intervention have taken?

In my view what was required at a very early point was a private conversation between President Obama and President Putin. In it Obama would have said to Putin something like, "What's your price for requiring President Assad to stand down and make way for internationally supervised elections?" That's the way an American president who was a real statesman would have played it. My speculation is that Putin would have responded positively on terms acceptable to Obama.

Now to your assertion that you and President Bush should not be blamed in whole or in part for what is happening in Iraq today.

As anyone who has worked there knows, Kabul is a tough place, redeemed by the charm of the people and the abundance of cheap taxis. But Trevor Paglen had trouble finding a taxi driver willing and able to take him where he wanted to go: north-east out of the city along an old back road reputed to be so dangerous - even by Afghan standards - that it had seen no regular traffic for more than 30 years. Finally he succeeded in digging out an old man who had been driving a cab since before the Soviet invasion. "We started driving and we left the city behind and we're out in the sticks," he recalls, "and we end up in a traffic jam - not cars but goats. And we wait for the goats to go by and we see the shepherd, this very old man, traditional Afghan clothes, big beard, exactly what you'd picture in your head. But he's wearing a baseball hat.

"The shepherd finally turns to look at us in the car - and on that baseball cap are the letters KBR. It stands for Kellogg Brown and Root - a company that was a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Dick Cheney was on the board of. The local goatherd is wearing a Dick Cheney baseball cap!" It was the final clue he needed that this particular bad road was the right road. There in the distance, behind a high cream wall and coiled razor wire, was what Paglen was looking for: the nondescript structures of what he says he is "99.999 per cent sure" is the place they call the Salt Pit: a never-before-identified-or-photographed secret CIA prison.

Trevor Paglen is an artist of a very particular kind. His principal tool is the camera, and most of his works are photographs, but the reason they are considered to be art - the reason, for example, that this bland photo, three feet wide by two feet high, showing the outer wall and the interior roof outline of the Salt Pit, with a dun-coloured Afghan hill behind it, sells for $20,000 - is because of the arduous, painstaking, sometimes dangerous path that culminated in pressing the shutter; and because it reveals something that the most powerful state in history has done everything in its power to keep secret.

First, I have to explain the title: "A scorecard for US war on Russia": what we are witnessing today is beyond any doubt a US war on Russia, except that it that is is neither quite "cold" nor "hot": it's tepid, lukewarm. Not for the people dying of course, but by it's choice of methods. It is not a Cold War because people are dying, because tanks, artillery and airpower is being used on a daily basis now, but it is not a Hot War either, because while people in the Ukraine are being killed, the real target of this war is, of course, Russia. In other words, this is not a Russian-Ukrainian war, nor is it a US-Ukrainian war, it is a US-Russian war, fought in the Ukraine with "Hot War" methods, but whose real target are not the murdered people in the Ukraine but Russia as a country and a civilizational project. I think that it is crucial to state that to make a correct analysis of what is going on.

In a newly unearthed audio interview Hillary Clinton reveals how she managed to get a plea bargain for a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl - and shockingly laughs as she indicated she knew he may have been guilty.

During the course of the conversation which dates from the early 1980s, Clinton, then 27, outlines how she used a mistake by the prosecution to get 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor to walk free.

Indeed, so cavalier is her attitude to securing the freedom of a man suspected of raping a child that the shocking and candid interview may tarnish her role as an advocate for women and children in the United States.

The recordings which date from 1983-1987 were discovered by the Washington Free Beacon and are of Clinton recalling her role in the most important criminal case of her career.

This is not the first time that the trial has been written about.

In 2008 at the height of her primary battle with Barack Obama, a Newsday story focused on Clinton's deeply controversial strategy of attacking the credibility of the girl.

'Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader's honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out 'older men' like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed 'Hillary D. Rodham' 'in compact cursive,' wrote Newsday.

Evidence of state-sanctioned violence raises questions about UK funding of improvements to the 'internal security sector'

Concern is mounting that British aid money may be funding police who are using rape as a tool of state-sanctioned torture against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The claims emerged during last week's Ending sexual violence in conflict summit in London hosted by the UK foreign secretary, William Hague, and Angelina Jolie.

A report from the charity Freedom From Torture (FFT), has collated medical evidence from 34 female political activists who have fled to the UK from DRC. It has found that the country's police and security personnel are systematically raping President Joseph Kabila's female opponents.

This evidence has raised questions about the UK government's programme to give more than £60m to the Congolese national police and "internal security sector" to improve its performance and accountability.

The programme, run by the Department for International Development (DfID), states: "This programme will benefit Congolese citizens through improved security and justice delivery with a special attention to women and girls."

One female political activist who fled to the UK after being detained, raped and tortured by police in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, said: "Many are raped by secret police and other security officials. When I was living in Congo I didn't see any improvement in the police. Perhaps the money from the UK government is making the police stronger so they can rape us more. While William Hague is calling for the elimination of rape as a weapon of war, his government is funding a police force that rapes with impunity."