Tehran - Clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has tightened his grip on Iran's faction-ridden politics after loyalists won over 75 percent of seats in parliamentary elections at the expense of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a near-complete count showed.

The widespread defeat of Ahmadinejad supporters - including his sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad - is expected to reduce the president to a lame duck after he sowed divisions by challenging the utmost authority of Khamenei in the governing hierarchy.

The outcome of Friday's vote, essentially a contest between conservative hardline factions with reformist leaders under house arrest, will have no big impact on Iranian foreign policy, notably its nuclear stand-off with the West. But it will boost Khamenei's influence in next year's presidential election.

With 90 percent of ballot boxes counted, Khamenei acolytes were expected to occupy more than three-quarters of the 290 seats in the Majlis (parliament), according to a list published by the interior ministry on Sunday.

In the race for the 30 seats in the capital Tehran, a Reuters tally of preliminary returns showed Khamenei supporters had taken 19 and pro-Ahmadinejad candidates the rest. Leading in popularity was Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, a key ally of Khamenei and father-in-law to the paramount leader's son, Mojtaba.

Vladimir Putin faces new protests on Monday to challenge his victory in a presidential election he said had prevented Russia from falling into the hands of enemies trying to usurp power.

Putin's opponents, complaining of widespread fraud in Sunday's election, said they did not recognize the results and would rally near the Kremlin at 7 p.m..

But the former KGB spy, who after four years as prime minister will be returning to the post he held from 2000 until 2008, said with tears rolling down his cheeks that he had won a "clean" victory.

"I promised you we would win. We have won. Glory to Russia," Putin, dressed in an anorak and flanked by outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, told tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters on Sunday night under the Kremlin's red walls.

Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Greg Palast led a four-continent investigation of BP PLC for Britain's television series Dispatches. From 1989-91, Palast directed the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding for Alaska Native villages.

Some deal. BP gets the gold mine and its victims get the shaft. And a few lawyers will get vacation homes - though they won't be so stupid as to build them on the Gulf Coast.

On Friday night, the judge-picked lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a back-room deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the lawyers the hard work of a trial and save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of exposing the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out.

I have been to the Gulf and seen the damage -- and the oil that BP says is gone. Miles of it. As an economist who calculated damages for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, I can tell you right now that there is no way, no how, that the $7.8 billion BP says it will spend on this settlement will cover that damage, the lost incomes, homes, businesses and boats, let alone the lost lives -- from cancers, fetal deformities, miscarriages, and lung and skin diseases.

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it's corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it's a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn't gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the "Too Big To Fail" concept. Because it is considered a "systemically important institution" whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

US, Washington - President Barack Obama addressed the largest pro-Israel policy conference Sunday morning in a speech that offered tough words for Iran but an even stronger defense of his administration's own policies toward Israel.

"If during this political season you hear some question of my administration's support for Israel, remember that it's not backed up by the facts," Obama said in his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). "There should not be a shred of doubt right now: When the chips are down, I have Israel's back."

As the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran loomed over the three-day conference, Obama reaffirmed his willingness to use "all elements of American power" -- including military force -- to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and denounced a policy of containment.

Obama will meet on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, where the two are expected to vigorously debate Israeli's concern that the U.S. has not done enough to prevent Iran for acquiring a nuclear weapon.

But in his speech, Obama also defended his administration's approach of sanctions and diplomacy, saying that he would rather see diplomatic solutions prevail than military ones, and that he has "a deeply-held preference for peace over war."

Demonstrators prepare scenes in Syria, to upload it on YouTube and to send it to different Channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyah (who want to enhance their reputations) and these channels spread the fake videos to the rest of the world.

The movie J. Edgar is once again focusing attention on Director J. Edgar Hoover and the imperious way he ran the FBI for almost 48 years. Nothing illustrates that better than the case of John Dillinger.

Of all the gangsters of the era, Dillinger was the most notorious. Beginning in 1933, his gang commanded the attention of the bureau and the media with a crime spree through the Midwest. After a series of 10 bank heists, the murder of a police officer, and a holdup of a police station to obtain guns and ammunition, Dillinger escaped from jail in Crown Point, Ind.

On April 22, 1934, FBI agents received a tip that Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, and other members of Dillinger's gang were at Little Bohemia Lodge, a summer resort 50 miles north of Rhinelander, Wisc. Melvin H. Purvis, the special agent in charge in Chicago, led his agents to the lodge, intending to surround it. But barking dogs gave them away.

Purvis told his men to be ready to fire. Alarmed by the commotion, three local residents who had stopped by the lodge for a cocktail ran outside and tried to drive away. In the dark, the men did not see the agents. Nor, with engines running, could they hear the command to surrender. The agents opened fire on them, killing one innocent man and wounding the other two.

Alerted by the gunfire, Dillinger and his gang escaped through the back windows of the lodge.

Al Jazeera and other private media channels are lying through their teeth about people killed, detained and missing at the hands of the government forces in Syria. The UN reported that 5,000 people had been killed... the following Syrian investigative report found it to be complete BS, fabrications by the Syrian 'opposition' network in collusion with Western agents.

The following documentary exposes the myth at the heart of the West's narrative in its war against Syria.

Part 1

Who hasn't heard of the peaceful uprising in Syria that was supposedly suppressed by the Syrian government?

We've heard it everywhere; from social networks, news...even TV shows have a spin at it.

Do you really know what's happening in Syria or are you being lied to?

Here are 10 things you may not have known.