The US has warned outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki against attempts to stay in power after the country's president officially named a replacement for the politician. Maliki recently lost the trust of both his Western and domestic allies.

His former backers - Washington, Tehran, and the Shia clergy - are now blaming Maliki for increasingly sectarian policies and failure to counter a massive offensive by Sunni militants from the Islamic State group (formerly known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS/ISIL).

Maliki's dismissal came after repeated claims from US President Barack Obama that Iraq's problems will never be solved without the formation of a new, more inclusive government.

Iraqi President Fuad Masum accepted the nomination of Haidar al-Abadi - leader of Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party - for prime minister on Monday.

"The country is in your hands," Masum said, expressing hope that the new PM will be able to win the sympathy of parliament and end the violence in the country.

They arrived bristling with heavy weapons and waving black flags from about a dozen Humvees, seized from the Iraqi army and supplied originally by the United States.

When the terrified residents looked out of their windows, they saw that Kosho, their traditional walled village in the mountains of northern Iraq, had been surrounded by jihadists. More than 200 bearded militants had besieged the village.

Then their leader - a local man from Mosul rather than the foreigners who make up more than a third of the ranks of the group now known as Islamic State - offered them a chance to save their lives.

'He told us that either we become Muslims or they would kill us all,' said Falah, mayor of the village made up mainly of members of the ancient Yazidi sect. 'We offered money but they would not accept it.'

Moscow and Kiev have agreed on a humanitarian mission under the authority of the Red Cross, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated.

"With careful optimism, I can now say that, I think, all possible and impossible pretexts have been dismissed. I hope that in the very nearest future this humanitarian action will take place under the authority of the Red Cross," Lavrov said.

"We've agreed on all details with the Ukrainian leadership," the Foreign Minister declared.

He also expressed hope that "Western partners won't put a spoke in the wheel and will think about the people who are badly in need of water and electricity," Lavrov said.

Russia, together with the International Red Cross Committee, is sending a humanitarian convoy to Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the head of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, according to the president's press service.

The Chinese foreign ministry strongly questioned the intentions of the United States over the weekend with regards to an Asian territorial dispute that has attracted the opinion of US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his American counterpart were both among the attendees at this weekend's ASEAN Regional Forum in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, where representatives from 26 countries came together to discuss policy and security issues concerning the Asia-Pacific region. Now in the aftermath of the event, Wang's office is instructing the US to refrain from interfering in one of the matters in particular that Sec. Kerry spoke of at the forum: the ongoing dispute involving Beijing's claims regarding the South China Sea and those from other neighboring nations.

"China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are totally able to safeguard well the peace and stability of South China Sea," the Chinese Foreign Ministry quoted Wang as saying, "in immediate response to the so-called tense situation propagated by some countries over the South China Sea."

The statement, published by the Foreign Ministry on Monday this week, says that Wang insisted during the multinational conference that China and ASEAN are capable of handling the territorial dispute in calm, yet "he could not understand why some countries out of the region stayed restless to propagate its tense situation."

In a startling revelation, it has come to light that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon asked the "members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) not to take into account the report submitted by the UN Board of Inquiry that accused Israel of targeting UN buildings in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009". Quoting some documents released by WikiLeaks on Friday, TeleSUR English reported, "Ban Ki-moon secretly worked with Israel to undermine UN report into Gaza war crimes."

"Ban wrote a letter to the UN Security Council asking its members not to take recommendations by the UN Board of Inquiry about Israeli bombings in Gaza into account," the report alleged. In its report, the UN Board of Inquiry had concluded that "Israeli Defense Force (IDF) targeted UN buildings in Gaza Strip in seven of the nine attacks. The report also accused Israel of having "breached the inviolability and immunity of UN premises". It had recommended an impartial probe into the bombings at UN facilities. According to WikiLeaks, White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice spoke four times with Ban Ki Moon "to discuss concerns over the Board of Inquiry's report on incidents at UN sites in December 2008 and January 2009".

"Rice urged Ban not to include the recommendations in the final report's summary, which was supposed to be transmitted to the UN Security Council on May 5," says WikiLeaks.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis

Surveillance cameras, government agents listening in on your phone calls, reading your emails and text messages and monitoring your spending, mandatory health care, sugary soda bans, anti-bullying laws, zero tolerance policies, political correctness: these are all outward signs of a government - i.e., a societal elite - that believes it knows what is best for you and can do a better job of managing your life than you can.

This is tyranny disguised as "the better good." Indeed, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this is the tyranny of the Nanny State: marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots. Thus, this explains the recent rash of parents getting charged with negligence and arrested for leaving their kids alone for any amount of time, whether at a park, in a store, in a car, or in their front yard - another sign of what C.S. Lewis referred to as tyranny exercised by "omnipotent moral busybodies."

For example, working mom Debra Harrell was arrested, spent 17 days in jail, lost custody of her daughter, and if convicted, could spend up to 10 years in jail all because she let her 9-year-old daughter play alone at a nearby park. Single mother Shanesha Taylor, unemployed and essentially homeless, was arrested for leaving her kids in her car during a 40-minute job interview.

For the so-called "crime" of allowing her 7-year-old son to visit a neighborhood playground located a half mile from their house, Nicole Gainey was interrogated, arrested and handcuffed in front of her son, and transported to the local jail where she was physically searched, fingerprinted, photographed and held for seven hours and then forced to pay almost $4,000 in bond in order to return to her family. Gainey now faces a third-degree criminal felony charge that carries with it a fine of up to $5,000 and 5 years in jail.

Meet the new, slimmed down, less complex, more manageable Citigroup. Or not.

Figuring out what Citigroup owns and what it has sold is getting harder by the day as a vast number of its subsidiaries in the 160 countries in which it operates have up and vanished from its public filings but do not actually appear to have been sold in many cases.

One can understand why the global bank's Federal regulators have thrown up their hands in despair and sent it back to the drawing board on its capital plans and so-called "living will" measures to unwind itself should its future insolvency threaten the financial system as it did in 2008.

According to Citigroup's annual 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the number of Citigroup's subsidiaries have shrunk by a whopping 91.8 percent since December 31, 2008. Or not.

Take the case of Automated Trading Desk (ATD). One could certainly see why Citigroup would like to forget it owns that company. Citigroup paid $680 million for the company when it bought it in 2007. Five years later, it paid another $590 million to settle a class action lawsuit by ATD's key shareholders who alleged they had been defrauded.

Russia's Presidential Administration wants to study the effectiveness of election campaigns online in general, and social networks in particular, seeking to understand the preferences of the younger generation in the rapidly-changing political reality.

The companies that will be conducting the research were chosen in a tender and two winners are groups in the St. Petersburg State University, reports the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily. They will work with latest examples of public unions' participation in polls, analyze the current government restrictions in the web sphere and prepare some suggestions on how to alter the Russian laws governing the internet.

According to the newspaper, the initial idea of the study appeared after the August mayoral poll in Moscow, which became the political debut of the popular anti-corruption blogger Aleksey Navalny. The activist received over 35 percent of the votes, coming second after incumbent Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, representing (albeit not officially) the parliamentary majority United Russia party.

This relative success was an unpleasant surprise for the authorities and now the presidential administration is seeking to brace the same modern political strategies, Nezavisimaya Gazeta claims.

Germany is asking foreign diplomatic missions to reveal the names of secret service agents working in the country, a report states. It comes amid the spy row between Berlin and Washington, following revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The German Foreign Ministry sent a note verbale to all the foreign embassies in Berlin on Wednesday, urging them to submit "lists of names of all active agents," Der Spiegel reported. The note was also addressed to consulates, cultural institutions, and intelligence apparatuses.

The Foreign Ministry reportedly expects its non-binding request to be answered by all the embassies. The ministry did not deny the information to AFP.

Media reports suggested that Germany's request was triggered by Berlin's disappointment with Washington's denials that US spies are operating in the country. Spiegel estimates that there are around 200 US intelligence officers operating in Germany under diplomatic passports.

Last night, President Barack Obama announced that he was authorizing American airtstrikes in Iraq. He described his intervention as a "humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain" and as an effort "to protect our American personnel." One word that he didn't mention is "oil," but it lies near the center of American motives for intervention.

The United States is conducting airdrops to aid the Yazidis who have fled the advance of Islamic State militants, but it is conducting airstrikes around Erbil, which is to the east. There are American consular personnel in Erbil, but they could be evacuated if necessary. What Obama left unsaid was that Erbil, a city of 1.5 million, is the capital of the Kurdish regional government and the administrative center of its oil industry, which accounts for about a quarter of Iraq's oil. The Kurds claim that if they were to become an independent state, they would have the ninth-largest oil reserves in the world. And oil wells are near Erbil.