According to latest research conducted by Russian state-owned agency VTSIOM the share of Russians who express willingness to vote for Putin in the nearest presidential polls is the largest in four years.

"Seventy-four percent of Russian citizens say that they are ready to vote for Vladimir Putin at the nearest presidential elections, due in the beginning of 2018. This is the maximum value in four years and an almost two-fold increase from 40 percent in October 2012," reads the letter issued by VTSIOM on Thursday.

"Fifteen percent of responders said they had no plans to support the incumbent president and 11 percent said they cannot give an answer to this question," the researchers added.

VTSIOM also noted in the letter that the support for Putin's candidacy was very high even among those who thought that the president has not yet fulfilled all promises made at the last elections campaign. At the same time, 37 percent of responders hold that the Russian leader has already fulfilled the major part of these promises. The share of those who think that Putin was true to only a part of his promises was 47 percent.

According to the poll conducted by VTSIOM in December last year 57 percent of Russians wanted to see Putin reelected as president in 2018. A further 11 percent said the incumbent president should be replaced by someone he himself proposes as his successor. Eighteen percent said that they would prefer another person as president who would suggest a different political course, while 14 percent of responders said it was too difficult for them to answer the question at the moment.

In the same poll, 48 percent of Russians said that currently no politician in the country could effectively replace Putin, while 33 percent said that the replacement could be found once the need arises and 6 percent answered that they already know a perfect candidate. Twelve percent of respondents said they found the question too complex to answer.

The daughter of a police shooting victim has brought a federal lawsuit for wrongful death, municipal liability, and failure to train and supervise against police who she claims shot and killed her naked mother for complying with their request to show the officers where she kept her handgun.

Fifty-four-year-old Deanne Choate was shot dead by Gardner police after they responded to a 911 call that she had been drinking and was suicidal. Police arrived, arrested Choate's boyfriend, then entered Choate's bedroom where she was asleep, naked.

The officers demanded to know where she kept her gun for eight minutes.

Dramatic footage from Istanbul shows the moment two female attackers launched an attack on a riot bus entering a police compound. One can be seen shooting at the vehicle with a machine gun while the second threw a grenade, before both fled the scene.

Two activists in clown costumes have disrupted a meeting of the German anti-migrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) by throwing a cake into the face of Beatrix von Storch, one of the party's leaders and a European Parliament member. The men approached von Storch while she was presiding over a closed-door AfD party meeting held in Kassel on February 28. They sang "Happy Birthday" as one of them threw a cake into von Storch's face and the other filmed the incident.

Von Storch's fellow party members seized the attackers and called police. The Peng Collective, a culture activism group from Berlin, claimed responsibility for the 'sweet attack' and said the 'clowns' were "beaten, kicked, arrested and handed over to the police."


The activists said they were protesting in response to von Storch suggesting police should be allowed to shoot migrant women and children entering Germany illegally. A statement posted on the group's website entitled "Tortenbefehl" (Pie order) after the attack says: "Who[ever] wants to prevent the crossing of a moral border, must, if necessary, make use of a cream pie," in apparent reference to von Storch's recent comments.

There were untapped potentials for Russia and Viet Nam to further co-operate in the shipbuilding industry, Maxim N Kochetkov, Director for the Shipbuilding Industry and Marine Department under the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade, said.

In an interview with Vietnam News Agency correspondents in Moscow, he said the two countries have co-ordinated in this field for years.

The Klylov State Research Centre and the Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Technology Centre of Russia are considering the possibility of implementing Viet Nam's proposals to help the country's shipbuilding technology meet international standards.

The two centres are also considering working together in building a deep-sea fleet in Viet Nam, and collecting necessary information about Russia's fishing vessel building projects in order to satisfy Viet Nam's proposals, he said.

He stressed the need to define the kind of ship that would have an advantage in Viet Nam, as well as learning about the country's infrastructure facilities to serve the building of these ships.

Russia is willing to consider financial plans to carry out joint projects with the Southeast Asian country, he stated, adding that Russia's universities are also willing to help Viet Nam train students on shipbuilding, while the Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Technology Centre is ready to consider the provision of hi-tech equipment for the country

Three former and current San Francisco sheriff's deputies charged with forcing jail inmates to fight each other surrendered to authorities and will be arraigned next week, according to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.

District Attorney George Gascon on Tuesday announced felony and misdemeanor charges against the three deputies in connection with the alleged jailhouse "fight club" incidents, which occurred in March last year.

Former Deputy Scott Neu, who allegedly forced inmates Ricardo Palakiko-Garcia and Stanley Harris to fight each other in the county jail at 850 Bryant St. by threatening to mace or tase them or revoke privileges, has been charged with eight felonies and nine misdemeanors.

Current Deputy Eugene Jones, who allegedly participated in forcing the inmates to fight on one occasion, has been charged with two felonies and two misdemeanors. Deputy Clifford Chiba, who was allegedly present during a
match and failed to report it, faces three misdemeanor counts.

We are being discovered because we are the only campaign that will defy the establishment by bailing out young people in the way we bailed out the bankers and bailed out Wall Street, Jill Stein, US presidential hopeful for the Green Party, told RT.

RT: Could you please describe your experience running for president as a third-party candidate?

Jill Stein: Well, it is a very exciting and dynamic time. In many ways what the country needs right now is not only a revolutionary campaign, but a revolutionary political party.

There has been an incredible outpouring of support for his [Bernie Sanders] campaign, likewise for the [Donald] Trump campaign. It is interesting that in both political parties the candidates that are doing well are outsider candidates. People in both parties are repudiating their party leadership, and if you look at polls of the American electorate, the biggest chunk of Americans now have rejected both the Democratic and Republican parties. But what our political system does is suppress political opposition, I am sorry to say. So the media tends not to cover us.

There is a rebellion going on in full swing and we are being discovered especially by young people, because we are the only campaign that will truly defy the establishment by bailing out young people in the way that we bailed out the bankers and we bailed out Wall Street. We're calling out for a bailout of an entire generation of young people - 43 million young people. And it turns out... if they hear about our campaign and come out to vote that is enough to win the race.

The presidential elections of 2016 have several unique characteristics that defy common wisdom about political practices in 21^st century America.

Clearly the established political machinery - party elites and their corporate backers -have (in part) lost control of the nomination process and confront 'unwanted' candidates who are campaigning with programs and pronouncements that polarize the electorate.

But there are other more specific factors, which have energized the electorate and speak to recent US history. These portend and reflect a realignment of US politics.

In this essay, we will outline these changes and their larger consequences for the future of American politics.

We will examine how these factors affect each of the two major parties.

It's not only toxic - it's driven by a right-wing billionaire who profits more from flipping land than drilling for gas

Aubrey McClendon, America's second-largest producer of natural gas, has never been afraid of a fight. He has become a billionaire by directing his company, Chesapeake Energy, to blast apart gas-soaked rocks a mile underground and pump the fuel to the surface. "We're the biggest frackers in the world," he declares proudly over a $400 bottle of French Bordeaux at a restaurant he co-owns in his hometown of Oklahoma City. "We frack all the time. What's the big deal?"

McClendon dominates America's supply of natural gas the same way the Tea Party-financing Koch brothers control the nation's pipelines and refineries. Like them, McClendon is an influential right-wing power broker - he helped fund the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry in 2004, donated $250,000 to the presidential campaign of Rick Perry, and contributed more than $500,000 to stop gay marriage. But unlike his fellow energy czars, McClendon knows how to tone down his politics and present a friendlier, less ideological face to the public. He secretly gave $26 million to the Sierra Club to fight Big Coal, and built a Google-like campus for Chesapeake's 4,600 employees in Oklahoma City, complete with a 63,000-square-foot day care center, a luxurious gym and four cafes manned by cook-to-order chefs. He even voted for Barack Obama because he thought the country needed "an inspirational figure."

At 52, McClendon still looks like the whip-smart accountant he once aspired to be - crisp white shirt, polished shoes, a toss of white hair. To hear him tell it, the cleaner-than-coal fuel he produces will revive our faltering economy, free us from the tyranny of foreign oil and save the planet from global warming. "I have a fossil fuel that makes other fossil fuels obsolete," he boasts. By McClendon's estimate, the industry has drilled more than 1.2 million wells nationwide, yet so far there have been only a few confirmed cases where things have gone wrong - despite dire warnings from scientists and environmentalists that fracking pollutes rivers and streams, contaminates drinking water and turns large swaths of farmland into industrial moonscapes. "Where is the mushroom cloud?" McClendon asks. "Where are the dogs with one leg? Where are the people that have been maimed or hurt?"

He sips his Bordeaux; his own private wine cellar once boasted more than 10,000 bottles. It's a good riff, with some truth to it. But what McClendon leaves out is the real nature of the business he's in. Fracking, it turns out, is about producing cheap energy the same way the mortgage crisis was about helping realize the dreams of middle-class homeowners. For Chesapeake, the primary profit in fracking comes not from selling the gas itself, but from buying and flipping the land that contains the gas. The company is now the largest leaseholder in the United States, owning the drilling rights to some 15 million acres - an area more than twice the size of Maryland. McClendon has financed this land grab with junk bonds and complex partnerships and future production deals, creating a highly leveraged, deeply indebted company that has more in common with Enron than ExxonMobil. As McClendon put it in a conference call with Wall Street analysts a few years ago, "I can assure you that buying leases for x and selling them for 5x or 10x is a lot more profitable than trying to produce gas at $5 or $6 per million cubic feet."

Nearly half of children in the United States live dangerously close to the poverty line, according to new research from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Basic Facts about Low-Income Children, the center's annual series of profiles on child poverty in America, illustrates the severity of economic instability and poverty conditions faced by more than 31 million children throughout the United States. Using the latest data from the American Community Survey, NCCP researchers found that while the total number of children in the U.S. has remained about the same since 2008, more children today are likely to live in families barely able to afford their most basic needs.

"These data challenge the prevailing beliefs that many still hold about what poverty looks like and which children in this country are most likely to be at risk," said Renée Wilson-Simmons, DrPH, NCCP director. "The fact is, despite the significant gains we've made in expanding nutrition and health insurance programs to reach the children most in need, millions of children are living in families still struggling to make ends meet in our low-growth, low-wage economy."