A billionaire businessman at the heart of a $2.6 billion state bank scam in Iran, the largest fraud case since the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution, was executed today, state television reported.

Authorities put Mahafarid Amir Khosravi, also known as Amir Mansour Aria, to death at Evin prison, just north of the capital, Tehran, the TV reported. The report said the execution came after Iran's Supreme Court upheld his death sentence.

Khosravi's lawyer, Gholam Ali Riahi, was quoted by news website khabaronline.ir as saying that the death sentence was carried out without him being given any notice. Death sentences in Iran are usually carried out by hanging.

"I had not been informed about the execution of my client," Riahi said. "All the assets of my client are at the disposal of the prosecutor's office."

State officials did not immediately comment on Riahi's claim.

The US is to blame for whistleblower Edward Snowden ending up in Moscow, but Russia is not the type of country that hands over fighters for human rights, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday.

"[Snowden] arrived at our transit zone and later it was explained that no one wanted him ... And they [the Americans] scared everyone, and he ended up in our transit zone. What were we supposed to do? Russia is not the type of country that gives up fighters for human rights," Putin said during the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

"Why did [the Americans] scare the whole world? If they can force planes down with presidents on board, then they could have forced down anything with Mr. Snowden on board anywhere," he said.

Last month, former US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was granted asylum in Russia last year, sent a video-recorded question to Putin's annual Q&A session asking the president whether the Russian government also intercepts data on its own citizens.

Putin answered that Russia has no such programs, as the country can neither financially nor technically afford to conduct such large-scale surveillance. He added the country likewise does not monitor telephone calls on a mass scale, as does the United States.

Self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics which recently held referenda on independence from Ukraine have declared the creation of Novorossiya union.

"We have signed a memorandum on the union," Denis Pushilin, co-chairman of the Donetsk People's Republic, told the media.

The new union will be called Novorossiya, said the people's governor of the Donetsk Region, Pavel Gubarev.

He added that the document was signed in the city of Donetsk by Donetsk People's Republic Prime Minister Aleksandr Borodai and the head of Lugansk People's Republic Aleksey Karyakin.

People's representatives from eight Ukrainian regions gathered for a congress in Donetsk on Saturday, a day ahead of scheduled countrywide presidential elections.

As a result of the congress, the south-eastern regions of Ukraine, where anti-government protests gained momentum, have announced the creation of a pro-federalization Popular Front socio-political coalition. The movement accepted a manifesto vowing self-determination and protection of people from "Nazi gangs' terror."

The coalition involves Odessa, Nikolaev, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Kharkov, Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk Regions.

A new investigative report from The Miami Herald this week profiles a prison in Miami-Dade County where employees have been accused of abusing mentally-ill inmates for "sport."

According to the Herald, three former employees of the psychiatric unit at Dade Correctional Institution have alleged that staff at the facility were tormenting and abusing mentally-ill inmates for years. One of the former employees took their complaints to the U.S. Department of Justice last month.

The Herald reports:

In his complaint, George Mallinckrodt, a psychotherapist assigned to the unit from 2008 to 2011, related a series of episodes, including the death of inmate Darren Rainey. The 50-year-old was placed in a small, enclosed, scalding-hot shower by guards and left unattended for more than an hour. He collapsed and died amid the searing heat, suffering severe burns when he fell, face up, atop the drain.

His death, for which no one has been held accountable, was described in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Mallinckrodt was no longer with the prison at the time of Rainey's scalding on June 23, 2012, but says he was told of the incident by a former colleague who remained on staff.

Here is a description of his death published in the Herald a few days earlier - also via reporter Julie Brown:

The purported details of Darren Rainey's last hour are difficult to read.

"I can't take it no more, I'm sorry. I won't do it again,'' he screamed over and over, according to a grievance complaint from a fellow inmate, as Rainey was allegedly locked in a shower with the scalding water turned on full blast.

A 50-year-old mentally ill inmate at the Dade Correctional Institution, Rainey was pulled into the locked shower by prison guards as punishment after defecating in his cell and refusing to clean it up, said the fellow inmate, who worked as an orderly. He was left there unattended for more than an hour as the narrow chamber filled with steam and water.

When guards finally checked on prisoner 060954, he was on his back and dead. His skin was so burned that it had shriveled from his body, a condition referred to as slippage, according to a medical document involving the death.

But nearly two years after Rainey's death on June 23, 2012, the Miami-Dade medical examiner has yet to complete an autopsy and Miami-Dade police have not charged anyone. The Florida Department of Corrections halted its probe into the matter, saying it could be restarted if the autopsy and police investigation unearth new information.

Seven people, including the gunman, have been killed after a spate of drive-by shootings terrorized the residents of Isla Vista near the University of California, Santa Barbara. Several others were wounded in the rampage.

Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown confirmed told a news conference early Saturday that seven people were killed, including the gunman, and another seven wounded.

Brown said the suspect exchanged gunfire with deputies before speeding away in a BMW and crashing into a parked car.

Police found the suspect inside the vehicle dead from a gunshot wound to the head. But the sheriff said it had not been determined if the suspect was shot and killed by police or if the wound was self-inflicted. A semiautomatic handgun was recovered from the scene.

Investigators are attempting to piece together what sparked the shooting.

Brown said there were a total of nine crime scenes cordoned off for forensic work.

Witnesses described the occupants of a black BMW as involved in the seemingly random shootings in this college town early Saturday morning.

The victims include an individual who was shot dead inside a deli, while another fatality occurred near a 7-11 convenience store.

Kelly Hoover, public information officer with the Sheriff's office, confirmed that a second suspect has been apprehended.

"The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell's 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface. Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age-old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars." - Paul Joseph Watson
Before Federal trolls or indoctrinated government "true believers", starts spreading their slurs, you had better gauge the sentiment in the real America. Seventy-two percent of Americans, in a Gallop poll say big government is a greater threat to the U.S. in the future than is big business or big labor, a record high in the nearly 50-year history of this question. Yet the "so-called" authorities would have you accept that only a conspiracy theorist thinks that the great protectors of law and order are capable of routing out Christians, 2nd Amendments advocates, 911 Truth proponents, Tea Party members, Patriot-Liberty groups or Global Warming deniers, and confining them to prison gulags. So when the House introduced HR 645, in 2009 that directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations, every citizen should feel threatened by its own government.

More disturbing details are emerging about this week's huge child-porn bust in the New York City area, including these: a dad secretly filmed his son's friend, 9, when she changed to go swimming; a nurse had 19 videos of kids under 13 having sex with adults, authorities say. Another man, whose father was deported in 2008 after flying to Chicago in hopes of having sex with a 14-year-old girl, is charged with having images of girls as young as six, the Journal News reports.

If there's one indicator of the state of the global economy it's consumer purchasing on the retail level. And if there's one retail company to watch as a prelude to what comes next it's always been Walmart. Known for low prices, low wages, and multi-billion dollar profits, the world's largest retailer is struggling.

According to a recent report from Motley Fool, the behemoth's same stores sales in the U.S. have dropped precipitously and internationally they have outright collapsed, signalling serious trouble ahead.

How do you get rid of hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water? You dump it into the Pacific Ocean of course! In Japan, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. has made the "painful decision" to begin purposely dumping massive amounts of radioactive water currently being stored at the destroyed Fukushima nuclear facility directly into the Pacific. This is being done even though water radiation levels near Fukushima spiked to a brand new all-time record high just a few days ago. The radioactive material that is being released will enter our food chain and will potentially stay with us for decades to come.

Fukushima is an environmental nightmare that never seems to end, but the mainstream media in the United States decided to pretty much stop talking about it long ago. So don't expect the big news networks to make a big deal out of the fact that Japan is choosing to use the Pacific Ocean as a toilet for their nuclear waste. But even though they aren't talking about it, that doesn't mean that radioactive material from Fukushima is not seriously affecting the health of millions of people all over the planet.

We'd like to think slavery is in the past, but this short and to-the-point documentary asks you to consider that the cellphone you're holding in your hand may have involved something equally terrible: young Chinese workers enduring 15-hour days without holidays or rights. These workers often contract leukemia due to toxic chemical exposure. Give this a view and let Nokia and Apple know what you think.