Whistleblower Chelsea Manning is now being slammed with $500 fines for every single day that she remains imprisoned in contempt of court for refusing to testify in a secret grand jury against Julian Assange. Next month it will increase to $1,000 a day.

Again, this is while Manning is also locked up in jail. It's not enough to re-imprison a whistleblower who already served years of prison time, including nearly a year in solitary confinement, for taking a principled stand against an opaque and unjust grand jury system; they're going to potentially ruin her life with crippling debt as well. The only way to make it more cruel and unusual would be to start waterboarding her or threatening her family members.

All for refusing to participate in a corrupt and unaccountable legal performance designed to imprison a publisher to whom she leaked evidence of US war crimes in 2010.

People see this. People watch this and learn from this, as sure as people watched and learned from the public town square executions of those who spoke ill of their medieval lords. And just like those medieval executions, many of the onlookers have been trained to cheer and celebrate at the fate of the accused; have a look at the power-worshipping, government-bootlicking comments under my recent tweet about Manning's persecution for a perfect example of this. People have been taught what happens to those who blow the whistle on the powerful, and they have been taught to become quite comfortable with it.

Among the freedoms that the flag stands for is our freedom of speech.
Over the weekend, President Trump tweeted his support for a bill proposed by Republican Senator Steve Daines that would outlaw flag burning - overturning a Supreme Court precedent that protects it as free speech.

Here's the tweet:

Riyadh bears responsibility for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a UN investigator said, calling for a further probe into Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's role in the crime.

Khashoggi was a victim of "a deliberate, premediated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia is responsible," Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said on Wednesday.

She made the remarks following the end of a six-month inquiry into the case. The rapporteur called for an additional probe into the role senior Saudi officials, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, may have played in Khashoggi's murder.

Indeed, this human rights inquiry has shown that there is sufficient credible evidence regarding the responsibility of the Crown Prince demanding further investigation.

Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir rejected Callamard's allegation on Wednesday, arguing the case had already been investigated by Saudi authorities and insisted it remain within the kingdom's jurisdiction.

Young Americans are killing themselves in record numbers, the victims of a confluence of economic and sociological factors that have singled them out - even above a nationwide surge in so-called "deaths of despair."

Suicide rates among teens and young adults aged 15 to 24 - the older end of "Generation Z" - spiked in 2017, reaching their highest point since 2000, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). They've risen 51 percent in the past 10 years, buoyed by rising rates of anxiety and depression along with social media and drug use, and the figures may be even higher, since some intentional overdoses are not counted as suicides.

Young men saw the steepest rise in deaths, according to the JAMA study, though women are catching up to them at an alarming pace. Teens and young adults report higher rates of anxiety and depression than previous generations, and multiple studies in recent years have shown that social media use exacerbates both conditions, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop that can have tragic consequences.

But Generation Z is simply following in the footsteps of its predecessors. The much-maligned millennial generation, defined by the Census Bureau as those born between 1982 and 2000 (meaning some are included in the JAMA study), are also killing themselves in record numbers. Drug-related deaths among ages 18 to 34 have increased 108 percent since 2007, while alcohol-related deaths are up 69 percent and suicides are up 35 percent, according to a report published last week by Trust for America's Health. While millennials have long been written off as entitled, spoiled snowflakes, the media and society are belatedly realizing that they aren't just layabouts unmotivated to exit their parents' basement - this "despair" has a cause, and it's primarily economic.

Botswana became the latest country to decriminalize gay sex on Tuesday, a landmark case for Africa, as the High Court rejected laws punishing it with up to seven years in prison.

Jubilant activists in the packed courtroom cheered the unanimous decision in the southern African nation that is seen as one of the continent's most stable and democratic. The ruling came less than a month after Kenya's High Court had upheld similar sections of its own penal code in another closely watched case.

"Botswana is the ninth country in the past five years to have decriminalized consensual same-sex relationships," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

"Consensual same-sex sexual relationships remain criminalized in at least 67 countries and territories worldwide," he told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York.

The city of Ridgetop, Tennessee, has disbanded its police force after a special-called meeting Monday night.

"It was all budget," said Ridgetop Mayor Tony Reasoner. "We can't afford it. Hopefully, and I'm going to float this idea with the board, but I think we need a 4-5 member board of citizens to come up with ideas on our future. Do we need a full-time or a part-time police department, or do we let the sheriff ... cover it?"

The Ridgetop police department had a budget of $429,000, said Reasoner, who also serves as the city's fire chief. He's been with the city since 1989.

Two transgender male athletes kept high school track runner Selina Soule from advancing in the New England girls' track regionals. Soule needed to be in the top six runners to advance, but came out eighth because the two biological males were also competing as transgender girls. She is now taking legal action with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to uphold her rights under the federal law providing equal access to women in education, known as Title IX.

Fox News' Tucker Carlson hosted Soule and ADF attorney Christiana Holcomb Monday night. "I've gotten nothing but support from my teammates and from other athletes," Soule said. "But I have experienced some retaliation from school officials and coaches."

This retaliation began after Soule's parents complained to the school principal, she said, saying she has received difficult requests to complete during practice that did not occur before she spoke out against transgender males competing in girls' sports. She is told that if she cannot fulfill these requests, then she cannot compete at all.

Female applicants outperformed their male counterparts in the entrance exam for Juntendo University's medical school, which had previously rigged the system to give men an unfair advantage toward admission.

Of the 1,679 women who took the fiscal 2019 exam, 139, or 8.28 percent, passed. Among the men, 170 of 2,202 applicants passed the exam for a success rate of 7.72 percent, Juntendo University said on June 17. It was the first time in seven years for women to have a higher pass rate than men at the private university in Tokyo. "This is a result of abolishing the unfair treatment of female applicants and repeat applicants," the university said in a statement.

In 2018, a number of medical schools were found to have manipulated the exam criteria to give first-time male exam takers an advantage over female applicants and those who had previously failed the exam.

The dean of Juntendo University's medical school in December last year raised a few eyebrows when he tried to justify the rigging of the exam system.

"Women mature faster mentally than men, and their communication ability is also higher," he said at a news conference. "In some ways, this was a measure to help male applicants." The university said it corrected its unfair practices for the fiscal 2019 exam and added female teachers to the teams that conducted interviews with the applicants.

A Judge let off a cocaine user after pointing out that Michael Gove had got away with the same crime.

He said the defendant should not be punished for being caught with a drug the Tory leadership contender admitted taking.

Judge Owen Davies QC gave Giedrius Arbaciauskas a 12-month conditional discharge.

He could have jailed the Lithuanian for up to seven years - but no further action will be taken if he keeps his nose clean.

Referring to Mr Gove's previous top job at the Ministry of Justice, the judge said of Arbaciauskas: "He should suffer no more for dabbling in cocaine than should a former Lord Chancellor."

A rocket was fired at the headquarters of a number of global oil companies, including ExxonMobil, west of Basra, Iraq on Wednesday, injuring three Iraqi workers.

Iraqi police said the rocket hit the Burjesia residential and operations headquarters, but no responsibility has been claimed for the short-range Katyusha missile that landed just 1,000 yards from Exxon's operation and residential area. Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Italian Eni SpA also operate out of the site.

The US evacuated hundreds of diplomatic staff from its Baghdad embassy in May, citing threats from Iran. Exxon staff were also evacuated at the time, and had just begun to return to Basra before this attack. After the rocket incident, Exxon said it was evacuating 21 foreign staff immediately.

There have been two attacks on bases housing US military personnel in Iraq in the last few days.