After raising a storm of controversy for manipulating its users emotions in the name of scientific research, Facebook announced new steps to consider future studies more carefully.

Facebook was widely criticized in June after researchers published the results of a study that measured the impact of showing almost 700,000 users more positive or negative stories in their news feeds. The study found a tiny but possibly significant impact on users' happiness from the manipulations.

"We were unprepared for the reaction the paper received when it was published and have taken to heart the comments and criticism," Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, said in a blog post on Thursday. "It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently."

Under the new policy, Facebook researchers will have to seek approval for sensitive projects from a new committee that will include members from the company's engineering, research, legal, privacy and policy teams. Notably absent are any reviewers from outside Facebook.

Ukraine is on the brink of committing economic suicide after imposing a crippling 55 percent tax on private gas producers, while parliament prepares to vote on next year's budget, which aims for a continuation of the same.

The Oct. 14 budget vote - which is already a month late - is a major condition for Ukraine's next credit tranche from the European Union, but if the 2015 budget goes through as proposed, it will decimate independent gas production, remove any potential for Ukrainian energy independence and deal a further blow to the already struggling economy.

"Kiev's attempt at fiscal discipline to fund the war effort in the east and stave off an economic crisis is not working, and the end result is going to be economic suicide," Robert Bensh, majority shareholder of Cub Energy, Ukraine's fourth-largest independent gas producer, told Oilprice.com from Kiev.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed off on the new tax code on Aug. 1, which effectively doubles the tax private gas producers in Ukraine will have to pay, calling into question any new investment, as well as commitment, by key producers already operating in the country.

For now, the new code will remain in force until the end of this year, during which time private gas drillers will be required to pay 55 percent of their subsoil revenue for extracting under five kilometers. This is up from 28 percent. Additionally, for any extraction beyond five kilometers, the tax will be 28 percent, up from 15 percent.

Despite strong lobbying efforts, the interim government plans to continue the new tax regime for next year, if it approves the budget.

The dire economic situation ahead of the Oct. 26 elections is accompanied by a growing sense of pessimism internationally.

Serbia has made it very clear that it will not join the European Union's sanctions against Russia, Serbian Ambassador to Russia Slavenko Terzić said on Friday.

"We do not want to join the sanctions against Russia . . . At this point, the Serbian leadership has clearly and precisely stated that we will never join sanctions again Russia," Terzić told reporters.

According to the ambassador, sanctions are "anachronistic political means" and "cannot resolve political issues". He noted that European countries may suffer from the bans themselves, as the countries' economies are closely linked.

The European Union has imposed several rounds of sanctions against Russia's largest banks, energy and defense companies, as well as certain individuals, over Moscow's alleged meddling in the Ukrainian conflict.

In August, Moscow was forced to respond with a one-year ban on certain food imports from the countries that had previously imposed sanctions against Russia.

An Internet video released Friday purports to show an Islamic State group fighter beheading British hostage Alan Henning. The video mirrored other beheading videos shot by the Islamic State group, which now holds territory along the border of Syria and Iraq.

The video ended with an Islamic State fighter threatening a man they identified as an American.

"Obama, you have started your aerial bombard of Shams (Syria), which keep on striking our people, so it is only right that we strike the next of your people," a masked militant said.

The Associated Press could not immediately verify the video's authenticity, though it was released in the same manner as other Islamic State group videos.

This is the fourth such video released by the Islamic State group. The full beheadings are not shown in the videos, but the British-accented, English-speaking militant holds a long knife and appears to begin cutting the three men, American reporters James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines.

Henning, 47, nicknamed "Gadget," had joined an aid convoy and was taken captive on Dec. 26, shortly after crossing the border between Turkey and Syria.

What are the odds?

You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for... well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you've created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.

You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the "backdoors" of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them -- and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.

You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn't make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can't say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you're doing, you prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and -- should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the Earth.

As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the intelligence-corporate complex.

President Vladimir Putin dismissed Western sanctions as "utter foolishness" yesterday and said they would not stop Russia developing into a stronger economic power.

Attempting to take the higher ground in a speech to foreign and Russian investors, Putin said he was relaxed about the measures imposed on his country over Ukraine even though they had broken the fundamental principles of the global economy.

Addressing financiers worried about the weakening economy, capital flight and a possible increase in state intervention, he said Russia was well placed to weather the storm.

"We truly want a country that is strong, flourishing, free and open to the world," he told the VTB Russia Calling investment conference, ruling out restrictions on capital and currency movements out of Russia.

Making clear his aim was to soothe worried investors, he later began a question-and-answer session by saying with a wry smile: "All I have to do is smile to show the devil is not as frightening as he seems."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law ratifying a historic treaty, committing Russia to an economic union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Eurasian Economic Union will come into effect in January 2015.

Putin's signature in the document puts the final dot in Russia's ratification of the union which will be in place on January 1, 2015, as the other union states are expected to complete ratification in the next few days.

The economic union is the next step of integration within the Customs Union between the three countries. The agreement had previously been ratified by the Russian State Duma and the Federal Council of Russia.

It will help cut trade barriers and be the largest common market in the ex-Soviet sphere, comprising over 170 million people. The troika of countries will cooperate in energy, industry, agriculture, and transport. The ruble will become the de facto currency of the organization, although each country will still keep their local currency.

Financial integration is a major part of the agreement, while Russian, which is very widely spoken in both Belarus and Kazakhstan, will be the working language of the union. The headquarters of the union will be in Moscow, with the courts in Minsk, and Almaty will be the home of the financial regulatory body.

Citizens of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan will have the right to work freely throughout the member states without the need for a work permit. Over the last three years trade within the Customs Union has increased by $23 billion, or by nearly 50 percent. At the end of 2013, it stood at $66.2 billion.

Belarus and Kazakhstan are in third place in foreign trade with the Russian Federation, after the EU and China.

Going...going...almost gone, but let's not forget him
Good riddance!

Eric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.

A corporate lawyer with the A-list Washington and Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights, his overseeing. and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation's police forces, his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them, threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face US treason charges), and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.

But Holder, who came into his position as the nation's top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation's biggest so-called "too-big-to-fail" banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the US but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.

Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street's banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes; he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes -- civil cases that in almost all cases allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks' stocks and hurt "innocent" shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevolence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions -- even billions -- of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week, Obama sounded less statesman and more salesman, with the usual pitch that American leadership is all benevolent and virtuous. America is pursuing, America is committed, America is prepared... and so on and on went the tiresome egocentric rhetoric.

But like a dodgy salesman, the "goods" that Obama is hawking are downright fake. Caveat Emptor: buy it at your peril. Not only that, but the entire presentation to the potential buyers is littered with sly mendacity and ridiculous falsification of world events.

The US president used his address to the 69th UN session not to genuinely explore a collective solution to pressing world problems but rather as an opportunity to indulge in "American exceptionalism" - the deluded notion that America is magnificent and superior to all other nations. Obama's speech was a breathtaking falsification of the real causes underlying many of the security threats facing the world, and an opportunity for him to shift the blame on to others.

As Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov pointed out, Obama disgracefully labelled Russia as a global threat along with the Ebola epidemic in Africa and Islamic State terrorism in the Middle East.

Obama told UN delegates: "As we gather here, an outbreak of Ebola overwhelms public health systems in West Africa, and threatens to move rapidly across borders. Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition. The brutality of terrorists in Syria and Iraq forces us to look into the heart of darkness."

He then went on to corral the rest of the world under American leadership. "We call upon others to join us on the right side of history - for while small gains can be won at the barrel of a gun, they will ultimately be turned back if enough voices support the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions."

It was an astounding distortion of history in which the culpable role of the US in multiple conflicts is glibly airbrushed out of the picture, replaced by Russia in the case of Ukraine, instead of acknowledging the destabilising role that Washington played by orchestrating a coup in that country.

Syrian Electronic Army hacked the Twitter account of the UNICEF to share the news of bomb blast in a Syrian school which killed 49 children

The pro-Assad hackers Syrian Electronic Army today hacked the Twitter account of UNICEF to share news of the bomb blasts in Homs, Ikrema (Syria) which took life of 49 children all under 12 years of age.

© Unknown
Tweets sent by Syrian Electronic Army from the UNICEF’s twitter Account

After taking over the Twitter account, SEA fired a total of 6 tweets from the hacked Twitter Account of UNICEF. Out of these 6 tweets, 3 tweets were in English and other 3 in Arabic but the text of the message was same.The UNICEF's Twitter admin were quick to notice the hack and all the tweets were soon deleted. Later on, UNICEF accepted and confirmed the hack through this tweet.