One in five U.S. workers was laid off in the past five years and about 22% of those who lost their jobs still haven't found another one, according to a new survey that showed the extent Americans have struggled in the sluggish labor market since the Great Recession ended.

Those who did find work had a difficult time with their job search and the effects of unemployment, the survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University found.

Nearly 40% said it took more than seven months to find employment and about one in five of laid-off workers said all they could find was a temporary position.

Almost half -- 46% -- of the estimated 30 million layoff victims who found new jobs said they paid less then their old ones, according to the survey of 1,153 U.S adults done over the summer.

"While job growth has been consistent, it has been insufficient to produce enough full-time jobs for everyone," the study said.

As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, 21-year-old Shadan Jabareen says she has experienced institutionalised discrimination since she was a child. In 1994, her parents wanted to get away from the constant noise and the overcrowded Umm al-Fahm and move to a Jewish-Israeli community.

"My dad heard an advertisement on the radio for homes in Katzir," she said, referring to a kibbutz, or Jewish agricultural community, in the country's north. "The admissions committee told my dad that they didn't want Arabs because it would lower the community's value in Katzir," Jabareen, who studies literature at Tel Aviv University, told Al Jazeera.

After a legal struggle, her parents eventually were admitted to buy a home in Katzir, where they lived for seven years. "The neighbours were usually okay with us, but the admissions committee never wanted us."

Admissions committees are common in small semi-cooperative Jewish communities across the Negev and Galilee regions in Israel. In compliance with larger regional councils, these admission committees evaluate potential residents and ultimately decide whether to accept them into the communities.

In March 2000, just a few years after the Jabareen family's struggle, the highly publicised Kaadan case made waves when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to discriminate in housing admission based on ethnicity or religion. The Kaadans, an Arab couple from a nearby town, waged a long legal battle to protest their being rejected by Katzir's committee.

Fourteen years down the line, on September 17, the Israeli Supreme Court essentially undid that ruling when it dismissed petitions put forward by rights groups challenging the Admissions Committee Law.

Passed in 2011, the legislation legitimises the use of admission committees to reject potential applicants based on "social suitability". If admissions committees view applicants as "harmful" to the "social-cultural fabric of the community town", they are permitted to turn them down.

Falling short of a majority, four judges ruled against the law. Judge Asher Grunis, one of the five judges who sided in favour of the law and struck down the petitions, ruled: "The court does not have a sufficient factual basis for a decision" because the objections raised in the petition are "hypothetical and theoretical claims".

Nonetheless, several rights groups say it is most frequently employed to block Arab citizens from living in Jewish communities.

Perhaps due to the pressure now being seriously put on departments across America to not be brutal psychopaths, new information has been released on the murder of homeless man James Boyd by APD officer Keith Sandy.

It has been revealed that prior to the murder of James Boyd, officer Keith Sandy already had plans to seriously injure the innocent homeless camper.

He was recorded talking to another officer, saying he was going to "shoot him in the penis with a shotgun".

Yes, you heard that correctly.

The Boyd Family's civil rights attorney has this to say on the matter.

"It's chilling evidence and stunning that he has not been criminally indicted. He says to a state police officer 'that f'ing lunatic, I'm going to shoot him in the penis.' It's crystal clear and he says it with contempt in his voice."

The killer cop tried to defend his words, saying the gross phrase was uttered "Jokingly, just kind of locker room banter, just told him, you know, 'Don't worry. I'll shoot him in the pecker with this and call it good."

He still seems to not even take this seriously; when you actually do something similar to what your 'locker room banter' was, it becomes not 'locker room banter', but the words uttered before murder.

What more needs to be said here? The info you take away from this must be abundantly clear.

Please share this with as many people as possible. Hopefully with our continued efforts to expose criminal cops, these events will happen in less and less frequency.

While we see a great deal of media coverage of Ukraine-related geopolitical risks, there hasn't been sufficient discussion about the dire economic and fiscal conditions the nation is facing. Writing about men in masks fighting in eastern Ukraine sells far more advertising than covering the nation's economic activity. However it's the economy, not the Russian army that has brought Ukraine close to the brink. And just to be clear, some of Kiev's economic and fiscal problems were visible long before the spat with Russia (see post from 2012).

Ukraine is now in recession. Deep economic ties with Russia have resulted in painful adjustments in recent months. The nation's exports are down some 19% from last year in dollar terms and expected to fall further. A great example of Ukraine's export challenges is the Antonov aircraft company known for its Soviet era large transport planes as well as other types of aircraft.

As the military cooperation with Russia ended, Antonov was in trouble. It had to take a $150 million hit recently by not delivering the medium-range An-148 planes to the Russian Air Force. The Russians will find a replacement for this aircraft, but in the highly competitive global aircraft market, it's far less likely that Antonov will find another client.

Here are some key indicators of Ukraine's worsening situation:

1. The nation's GDP is down almost 5% from a year ago and growth is expected to worsen.

Midwives in England have voted to go on strike in a dispute with the Government over pay, the Royal College of Midwives announced today.

The four-hour walkout would be the first in the group's 133-year history.

NHS Employers said the decision was "regrettable" and could worry pregnant women.

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) insisted that no mothers or babies would be put at risk and said midwives will still be there for women giving birth.

Ante-natal and post-natal appointments will be targeted by the action, scheduled to start at 7am on Monday, 13th October.

Midwives will join NHS members of the Unison and Unite unions, who have already voted in favour of strike action scheduled for the same day.

Last week the unions Unison and Unite, which represent nearly 400,000 workers between them, voted in favour of a strike. Their actions will target non-urgent and non-emergency services, meaning hospital outpatient appointments and community clinics could be affected.

The RCM said 82.2 per cent of its members voted to say they were prepared to take part in the strike, while 17.8 per cent were not. More than 94 per cent of midwives say they are prepared to take part in action short of a strike.

The turnout of those eligible to vote was 49.4 per cent.

Russia's Investigative Committee has launched a criminal case against Ukraine's military and civilian leadership, accusing top officials of "genocide" against the Russian-speaking population in southeast Ukraine during this year's conflict.

According to Russian investigators, "unidentified people from the country's highest political and military leadership of Ukraine, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard of Ukraine and Right Sector gave the orders aimed at the complete destruction of Russian-speaking citizens living on the territory of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics."

As a result of those actions about 2,500 people died, said Vladimir Markin, spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee.

"The investigation has found that Russian-speaking citizens were killed during attacks with multiple launch rocket systems Grad and Uragan, aviation rockets, tactical missiles Tochka-U and other kinds of heavy offensive weapons," he said.

A total more than 500 residential buildings as well as local social facilities, including hospitals and schools, were damaged since April 12, the Investigative Committee said.

It estimated that over 300,000 local residents have been forced to leave and seek asylum in Russia.

At least 15 people have been killed in the worst fighting in eastern Ukraine since a ceasefire was declared between government and pro-Russia forces three weeks ago, official sources say.

Presidential aide, Yury Biryukov, said in Kiev that the shelling erupted around the airport of the flashpoint city of Donetsk -- which is currently being controlled by pro-Russians - and left seven government soldiers dead and nine others injured.

Pro-Russia sources said five of their fighters died and eight were injured in the shelling.

According to the City Council of Donetsk, three civilians were also killed in the conflict.

Several residential, industrial, and government buildings were also destroyed over the weekend.

Since the five-month-long conflict in eastern Ukraine officially came to an end on September 5, both sides have been accusing one another of violating the ceasefire pact.

The writer's next show, Show Me a Hero, is the true story of a battle over public housing that convulsed New York in the 80s. Here, on location in Manhattan, he talks about how money corrupts US politics, the erosion of the working class, why it's a crime to be poor in America - and why he likes to argue

At the end of a long day scouting locations for his new TV miniseries, David Simon is sitting in his Upper West Side office in New York describing the type of person who needn't bother tuning in to his new show. He's speaking as a TV writer but also as a citizen angered by a political system that he thinks fails many of his fellow countrymen.

"People who think we're being well governed at the moment... well, there's no reason for them to watch. People who look at the inertia of Washington, at the partisanship, at the divisive and polarised discourse... people who think that's the way to build a just society, well, don't watch the show, because I got nothin' for you."

If, on the other hand, "You're starting to believe that even the vernacular we're using to argue about solutions to problems is dysfunctional, watch this show because I think it's a perfect metaphor for what the American government is no longer capable of doing - addressing problems in a utilitarian fashion for the good of most people. American politics has left the room when it comes to finding solutions for our problems."

Show Me a Hero, which will appear on screens late next year or in spring 2016, is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by former New York Times writer Lisa Belkin. It marks the time, says Simon, when American politics left the room.

"For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they're not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore. They're minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They're little girls." - 25-year-old victim of trafficking

"Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day." - John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

The mysterious disappearance of 18-year-old Hannah Graham on September 13, 2014, has become easy fodder for the media at a time when the news cycle is lagging. After all, how does a young woman just vanish without a trace, in the middle of the night, in a town that is routinely lauded for being the happiest place in America, not to mention one of the most beautiful?

Yet Graham is not the first girl to vanish in America without a trace - my hometown of Charlottesville, Va., has had five women go missing over the span of five years - and it is doubtful she will be the last. I say doubtful because America is in the grip of a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.

It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged sex workers in the U.S. The average age of girls who enter into street prostitution is between 12 and 14 years old, with some as young as 9 years old. This doesn't include those who entered the "trade" as minors and have since come of age. Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. As one rescue organization estimated, an underaged prostitute might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.

This is America's dirty little secret.

You don't hear much about domestic sex trafficking from the media or government officials, and yet it infects suburbs, cities and towns across the nation. According to the FBI, sex trafficking is the fastest growing business in organized crime, the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns. It's an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas.

The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for 13 years that enriched Dick Cheney's firm, Halliburton, and other private interests only to end in another Washington failure.

The public fell for the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" that were a threat to America and that if the US did not invade Iraq Americans risked a "mushroom cloud going up over an American city." With the rise of ISIS, this long war apparently is far from over. Billions of dollars more in profits will pour into the coffers of the US military security complex as Washington fights those who are redrawing the false Middle East boundaries created by the British and French after WW I when the British and French seized territories of the former Ottoman Empire.

The American public fell for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous country is now in chaos.

The American public fell for the lie that Iran has, or is building, nuclear weapons. Sanctioned and reviled by the West, Iran has shifted toward an Eastern orientation, thereby removing a principal oil producer from Western influence.

The public fell for the lie that Assad of Syria used "chemical weapons against his own people." The jihadists that Washington sent to overthrow Assad have turned out to be, according to Washington's propaganda, a threat to America.

The greatest threat to the world is Washington's insistence on its hegemony. The ideology of a handful of neoconservatives is the basis for this insistence. We face the situation in which a handful of American neoconservative psychopaths claim to determine the fate of countries.