Over two thousand people living in Pakistan have been killed by drone strikes in the past decade, according to a UN human rights investigator calling for America to release death toll figures.

Of the 2,200 dead, 400 were civilians and an additional 200 victims were deemed "probable non-combatants Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism announced on Friday.

Mr Emmerson is now urging the United States to release its own data on the number of civilian casualties caused by its drone strikes.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry told Emmerson that since 2004, at least 330 drone strikes were on record in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan's largely lawless region bordering Afghanistan.

In an interim report to UN General Assembly released on Friday, Emmerson said Pakistani government records highlighted that drone attacks had also seriously wounded at least 600since strikes began in 2004.

He said Pakistan had confirmed that "at least 400 civilians had died as a result of remotely piloted aircraft strikes and a further 200 individuals were regarded as probable non-combatants."

There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on "biblical law," and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and "Christian" America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social "deviants," beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these "deviants" are removed, other "deviants," including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as "nominal Christians" - meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible - will also be ruthlessly repressed. The "deviant" government bureaucrats, the "deviant" media, the "deviant" schools and the "deviant" churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these "deviants" will be annulled. "Christian values" and "family values" will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz - whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry - and legions of the senator's wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed "Christian" leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation "biblical." It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it - its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government - and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.

Public corruption, based on all the evidence, appears rampant. And the ranks of those convicted in office have swelled to absolutely unacceptable levels. State Senators as well as State Assemblymen; elected officials as well as party leaders; city council members as well as town mayors; Democrats as well as Republicans.

- Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (the district that has failed to rein in the serial crimes by Wall Street's biggest firms)

It's no surprise to me that New York is exceedingly corrupt. It's a huge city, with a ton of wealth and massive income inequality. That's basically the primary breeding ground for wide-scale corruption. However, it also comes as no surprise to me that the situation has gotten a lot worse in recent years.

After all, NYC is the headquarters of some of the largest financial institutions in the world. As such, some of the worst actors in the recent financial collapse call the city home. The whole world watched as these criminals and shysters not only evaded criminal charges, but were also rewarded trillions of dollars of public support for their efforts.

The example was set. Crime pays, and now the entire city seems to be following their lead.

Pam Martens has written and excellent article about corruption within New York's legal system. Some excerpts from Counter Punch are below:

The horrific images of hundreds of drowned refugees off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa reveal the real face of the European Union. Twenty-one years after the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht, the project of European unification under capitalism has turned into a nightmare in every respect.

From the outside, the EU resembles a fortress, before whose walls thousands of refugees lose their lives. Inside it resembles a prison, in which poverty, exploitation and oppression are rapidly increasing and the benefits of "unity" are exclusively reserved for the rich and powerful.

The dead of Lampedusa are victims of the European Union (EU) in a double sense.

The imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, supported by Europe; the fomenting of civil war in Syria; the looting of raw materials and the neocolonial exploitation of the countries of the Middle East and Africa have created conditions under which escape is the only hope of survival for many. Only a small fraction of the millions of refugees from the countries concerned make their way to Europe.

Attack by rebel forces on checkpoint in pro-government suburb of Jaramana kills at least 30 people, reports say

More than 30 people have been killed in a suicide bombing and ensuing battle at a checkpoint in Damascus, activists have said.

The blast came during an attack by rebel forces near the pro-government suburb of Jaramana, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) claimed.

The state news agency Sana blamed "terrorists" for the explosion and said it wounded 15 people, most of them seriously.

The pro-opposition SOHR said 15 rebels and at least 16 soldiers were killed.

Female politicians call for action to counteract wave of machismo sweeping through French politics

It's raining machismo in France. Chucking it down, in fact.

From parliament to local councils, via national media and regional newspapers, storms have erupted as French men indulge in misogynist outbursts that could have come from the cave age.

Now, thanks to the name-and-shame tactics of social media networks, France's long-suffering women, who might previously have shrugged off such attacks as everyday sexism and machismo, are hitting back.

The backlash came after a banal enough event: a male member of the UMP opposition in the Assemblée Nationale humiliated a female opponent by making clucking noises as she spoke during a late-night debate on the Socialist government's controversial pension reforms.

Four separate US drone attacks have claimed the lives of nearly two dozen people in different regions of the war-ravaged Afghanistan over the past 48 hours, local security sources say.

According to local Afghan officials, at least ten people were killed as two airstrikes ripped through the eastern Kunar Province near the border with Pakistan.

Also on Friday, two people lost their lives in a similar attack in Nuristan Province.

Russian police have detained hundreds of immigrants in the capital Moscow as part of a widespread crackdown on illegal immigration which aims to appease nationalist protests over the stabbing death of an ethnic Russian by a migrant worker.

Authorities announced that 675 people from Central Asia were rounded up in the Friday operation, and the detainees were fingerprinted and their details taken down.

Police further noted that they had registered 159 cases of immigration law violation, including 105 offenses punishable by deportation, as well as 11 cases into forged documents and illegal entrepreneurial activity.

Moscow police chief Anatoly Yakunin said security forces will continue to carry out weekly operations to round up more illegal immigrants.

Barack Obama has nominated Jeh Johnson to head the Department of Homeland Security. Johnson is actually a perfect choice for the Washington DC war criminals considering his prior track record. Since 2009 he has worked in the Department of Defense as their general counsel. In this role he has provided the legal justification for the Obama regime's foreign military interventions including drone strikes that have killed numerous civilians.

Johnson has also claimed that the Obama regime has the legal authority to kill American citizens if they take up arms with Al-Qaeda. Through these and other ridiculous legal assertions, Johnson has proven that he himself is a terrorist war criminal. Considering that the American economy is edging closer and closer to a total collapse they will need someone in charge of Homeland Security who is not afraid to give orders to kill Americans. Johnson as a terrorist war criminal will fit very nicely into this role.

According to a recent Washington Post article, Johnson was responsible for the prior legal review and approval of all military operations executed by the Obama regime. This makes Johnson an incredibly evil man. The Obama regime has been responsible for a number of war crimes including the authorization of drone strikes that have killed many civilians. Even women and children have been killed by some of these strikes.

It is also worth noting that the Obama regime launched an unprovoked attack against the sovereign nation of Libya which by the standards set after World War II is a war crime. Of course they almost did the same thing in Syria until it became clear that such an operation had no real support domestically or amongst the international community. It is hard to believe that anyone could possibly find an appropriate legal justification for such horrible atrocities but apparently if you are a criminal like Johnson this comes easy.

Former US vice president Dick Cheney has described disabling the wireless function of his heart defibrillator over fears terrorists would hack into it to cause a heart attack.

Mr Cheney, who served as vice president from 2001 to 2009, had the defibrillator fitted after suffering from long term cardiovascular disease and surviving five heart attacks.

Mr Cheney underwent a heart transplant two years ago, aged 70.

In 2007, while he was serving as vice president under George Bush, the device was disabled by his cardiologist Jonathan Reiner to prevent terrorists from giving his heart a potentially fatal shock.

Mr Cheney was working with Mr Bush on his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and helping to coordinate the War on Terror.

Popular Showtime series Homeland features a plot in which a soldier helps to hack a device fitted to the fictional US vice president to administer a deadly shock, a plot that Mr Cheney said he found credible.

"I was aware of the danger that existed... I found it credible. I know from the experience we had, and the necessity for adjusting my own device, that it was an accurate portrayal of what was possible,'' he explained.