The board of trustees of the University of Illinois voted Thursday to reject the appointment of Steven Salaita as dozens of student and faculty supporters of the professor packed the meeting room at the Urbana-Champaign campus.

Before and immediately after the vote, The Electronic Intifada questioned top university officials on video, including the president, chancellor, board chair and several trustees, about the apparent influence of pro-Israel donors on the decision to fire Salaita.

Salaita has expressed "disappointment" in the decision, stating, "I am speaking with my attorneys about my options."

Lone dissenter

A lone trustee, James D. Montgomery, voted in favor of Salaita's appointment.

Regarding Salaita's tweets, Montgomery, the only university official who did not evade questions, told The Electronic Intifada that it was "pretty clear that some of those opinions were justified and probably most of the people in this room would agree with the opinions in terms of the tragedy that is going on between Israel and Gaza."

Newly sanctioned Gazprom Neft plans to continue offshore oil extraction in its Prirazlomnoye Arctic field as planned, and will reach peak oil production by 2021, First Deputy CEO Vadim Yakovlev said.

Prirazlomnoye is Russia's first offshore Arctic field, and with 72 million tons of recoverable oil, will be a key source for future hydrocarbon production and development in Russia. Already 100 million barrels of the new ARCO Arctic blend have been extracted from the site, which began production in April 2014.

The fresh round of sanctions by the US and EU intend to freeze Russia's big Arctic and Siberia shale oil ambitions by barring foreign oil companies from supplying any technology or equipment for joint ventures in deep water, offshore, or shale projects.

The production platform located in the Pechora Sea in Arctic waters will produce 110,000 barrels per day by 2021, despite Western sanctions.

"At the moment, we don't think that this will affect our long-term plans," Vadim Yakovlev, told reporters Friday, just before the sanctions were published.

The Police Chief in Washington, DC, is speaking out against one of her officers and in support of a man who stopped to record police arresting a man on a sidewalk only to be harassed by police and suspected of involvement in a crime for doing so.

Metropolitan Police Department Police Chief Cathy Lanier said she was surprised by the officer's actions in the incident that happened this week, and that he is now under investigation because for clearly violating the department's own regulations.

In the cell-phone video recording posted on YouTube, several police officers could be seen arresting a man lying on the ground, with his belongings scattered on the sidewalk outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.

Just over 50 seconds into the video, an officer approaches the witness, Andrew Heining, to ask if he knows the person being restrained.

"Are you a part of this, sir?" the officer, identified as C.C. Reynolds, asked Heining. "You're videotaping an investigation. This can be evidence in the case you understand that?"

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.