Local and regional election took place across Russia on Sunday as millions went to the polling stations to elect 30 governors, 14 regional parliaments, three mayors and thousands of municipal assemblies, including Moscow's City Duma.

A record number of 75 million eligible voters were registered this year for the single election day on Sunday, according to the election commission chairman Leonid Ivlev.

The elections at all levels were held in all Russian regions except in the republic of Ingushetia. Thirty Russian regions elected their heads and governors, 14 regions elected legislative assemblies, while three administrative centers of Russian regions elected their mayors.

"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life." - Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we've walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance. The bogeyman's names and faces change over time - Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and now ISIS - but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security.

Ironically, just a short week after the 13^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we find ourselves commemorating the 227^th anniversary of the ratification of our Constitution. Yet while there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years since 9/11, there has been little to celebrate.

The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights - the first ten amendments to the Constitution - which historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like - all sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts - a recitation of the Bill of Rights would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

An astounding 72 percent of Americans say they are unhappy with Republicans in Congress, according to a recent poll.

President Barack Obama and the Democrats fared a bit better. The poll, conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News and released last week, found that only 54 percent and 61 percent said they disapprove of Obama and Democrats respectively.

Republicans' approval rating has been terrible for years, and Congress as a whole is almost universally disliked.

The findings may not have a strong bearing on the GOP's midterm elections chances. Recent polls show the Republicans have an edge in both the Senate and the House.

However, as The New York Times notes, the race is far from over. According to the The Upshot, the GOP's chances of a Senate majority may come down to "who's more unloved, Obama or the GOP."

As November nears, Democrats are doubling down efforts to keep the Senate. Last week, Obama told NBC's "Meet The Press" that "it makes a big difference if we've got at least one branch in Congress," even if they can't take back the House.

The Ebola outbreak in Liberia demands global help, says an aid worker

I wake up each morning - if I have managed to sleep - wondering if this is really happening, or if it is a horror movie. In decades of humanitarian work I have never witnessed such relentless suffering of fellow human beings or felt so completely paralysed and utterly overwhelmed at our inability to provide anything but the most basic, and sometimes less than adequate, care.

I am supervising the suspect tent, which has room for 25 patients who are likely to have Ebola - 80-90% of those we test have the virus. We administer treatment for malaria, start patients on antibiotics, paracetamol, multivitamins, rehydration supplements, food, water and juice while they wait for their results. Sometimes people have arrived too late and die shortly after arriving.

In one afternoon last week I watched five seemingly fit, healthy, young men die. I gave the first a bottle of oral rehydration solution and came back with another for the second. In the half a minute or so in which I had been away the first man died, his bottle of water spilt across the floor. The four others followed in quick succession.

The 'Ghost' brigade is one of the fighting forces of the Lugansk People's Republic. This video shows the recovery of 8 of their troops' bodies, discovered in shallow graves several weeks after they were captured, tortured, and executed by elements of Kiev's ATO fighting forces. One of the men had been decapitated. The version below has been censored. The uncensored version (age restricted) is placed below it.

After six years and over one billion dollars in development, the FBI has just announced that its new biometric facial recognition software system is finally complete. Meaning that, starting soon, photos of tens of millions of U.S. citizen's faces will be captured by the national system on a daily basis.

The Next Generation Identification (NGI) program will logs all of those faces, and will reference them against its growing database in the event of a crime. It's not just faces, though. Thanks to the shared database dubbed the Interstate Photo System (IPS), everything from tattoos to scars to a person's irises could be enough to secure an ID.

What's more, the FBI is estimating that NGI will include as many as 52 million individual faces by next year, collecting identified faces from mug shots and some job applications. So if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting, for instance, those prints (which will now also likely be asked for along with a photo) will be sent off to the government for processing.

The eurosceptic 'Alternative for Germany' party got more than ten percent of the vote in the country's regional elections on Sunday, making the right-wing a growing threat for Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

The AFD party won 10.1 percent of the vote in Thuringia and 11.9 percent in Brandenburg, according to projections on Germany's ARD TV announced after voting ended at 6 pm Sunday (1600 GMT).

Two weeks ago, the party already won 9.7 percent in an election in Saxony. With this weekend's results, the AFD will now have seats in three state assemblies. According to predictions by political analysts, the party has a strong chance of entering Germany's federal parliament after the 2017 general election.

Founded in early 2013 to oppose eurozone bailouts, it was branded as a group of "unelectable mavericks" by the German political elite. Yet, the AFD won over seven percent of the vote in the EU elections in May, entering the 28-nation bloc's parliament.

The 52-year-old party leader Bernd Lucke said the recent results in two more eastern states add to the momentum of the party. "We're delighted that voters have made the choice for a political renewal," he told German TV.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says around 930 French citizens are either fighting for the ISIL terrorist group in Iraq and Syria or planning to join the terrorists.
Cazeneuve presented the figure, which includes 60 women, during an interview with French weekly Le Journal de Dimanche on Sunday.

The French minister added that some 230 French nationals are looking to head to the areas controlled by the ISIL militants and that an estimated 36 French militants have been killed.

Furthermore, at least 70 people have been prevented from leaving France after authorities received alerts that they were suspected militants.

France has adopted a law aimed at stopping suspected militants from travelling, including a ban on foreign travels of up to six months; the law also gives authorities powers to temporarily confiscate and invalidate their passports.

French lawmaker Sebastien Pietrasanta revealed earlier that around 100 militants who have fought in Syria and Iraq have returned to France.Authorities fear that the French militants will use their combat skills against their countries upon returning home.

The Takfiri ISIL terrorists currently control parts of eastern Syria and Iraq's northern and western regions. They have committed heinous crimes and threatened all communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and Izadi Kurds, during their advances in Iraq.

Almost $27 billion of financial assets were pulled out of Britain in August in the run up to Scotland's vote on independence, according to a new report by a London-based consultancy comparing the capital outflow to the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008.

The financial outflow of 16.8 billion pounds ($27 billion) in August was the biggest since the white heat of the 2008 financial crisis when the US bank Lehman Brothers went bust, according to a CrossBorderCapital report compiled by the consultancy and released on Friday.

"Sterling outflows have been an issue since the end of June, but they really gathered pace in August and now look like intensifying again with the possibility of Scottish independence coming to the front of investors' minds," said Michael Howell, the managing director of the CrossBorder Capital.

The consultancy pointed out that the figures also dwarfed the selling of UK assets around the 2010 general election, afrer which there were several days of uncertainty over who would form the government.

This week's referendum in Scotland could result in the U.K. losing almost one-third of its landmass, and 8 percent of its population, and, very likely, its present prime minister. In a summer rich with shocks, the breakup of a United Nations Security Council member suddenly seems more likely than the long-predicted fracturing of Iraq.

Most people I spoke with when traveling through Scotland last month expected the battle for independence waged by the Scottish Nationalist Party to have been lost. Recent opinion polls, however, show that almost half of Scottish voters hope to break free of their London masters on Thursday.

Their disaffection was not the work of a day. It has been in the making for at least three decades. Jason Cowley, editor of Britain's leading political weekly, the New Statesman, correctly points out that Britain's Conservative prime minister in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, did more for Scottish independence with her regime of privatization, deregulation and unfair taxation than any Scottish nationalist. By some estimates, the deindustrialization that Thatcher presided over had more devastating effects in Scotland than in England.

That's why Thatcher's Conservative Party is almost extinct in Scotland, and its current leaders, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, evoke a visceral hostility and scorn. This isn't just class hatred for privately educated and plummy-accented Tories, or for the axis of Eton College, Rupert Murdoch's News International and the City of London that they embody.