Almost four million kids in Afghanistan are unable to attend school classes because of security and poverty issues, as well as discrimination against girls in the country, a new report by the UN agency for children reveals.

Some 3.7 million children aged between seven and 17 are deprived of their right to education in Afghanistan, UNICEF's Global Initiative on Out of School Children reports.

60 percent of those out-of-school are girls, who are at "a particular disadvantage" due to gender-based discrimination in the Muslim country, the UN Children's Fund said. The worst situation is currently in the Afghan provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Wardak, Paktika, Zabul and Uruzgan, where up to 85 per cent of girls are missing out on classes.

Lack of security in conflict areas and displacement of families due to fighting were mentioned as being among the reasons contributing to the first increase in the out-of-school rate in Afghanistan since 2002, UNICEF said in the paper. Poor education facilities and lack of women teachers were also a cause for concern, it added.

Let's get straight to the point before we belabor the ins and outs of the Tommy Robinson story and what it all means. Israel is, and has been, supporting just about every single far-right movement in Europe who will accept its support in exchange for supporting Israel against 'radical Islam' in the Middle-East. It has created for itself any movement with the phrase 'Defense League' in it. That includes Tommy Robinson's former comrades of the EDL - English Defense League.

Israel is doing three things, following the basic 'problem-reaction-solution' formula. First of all, their influence should neither be over-estimated, nor under-estimated. There is a strategy of tension at play here, and it does not necessarily revolve around Israel, but also revolves around the US which is actually at odds with the EU. But Israel is undoubtedly gaming this whole thing.

Their goal is to create a greater Israel, as spelled out in the Yinon Plan. FRN and CSS's own Joaquin Flores' detailed analysis of the probability that Israel, especially under Likud rule (who have always championed similar) is a good start in order to understand it.

In the old days, America's top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs. One ran for president. Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today's national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors' nighttime shows.

- Politico: The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio

May you live in stupid, corrupt and yet fascinating times.

- Me, paraphrasing a Chinese curse

Western media loves to paint Russia as a country loaded with corruption from top to bottom, as a megalithic banana-republic. The common perception of a society bought and paid for by oligarchs is what the average American has in their mind. These accusations, of course, are never validated but just thrown around and accepted because of repetition. But if you talk to somebody who is familiar with Russia you hear an entirely different story than what the media gives. RT has provided us with some actual numbers from recent polls of what Russians think about corruption in their country:

Around 55 percent of Russians believe the authorities are waging a successful war against corruption, with 47 percent saying that arrests of senior officials for bribery are the best proof of this.

In a survey conducted by state-run VTSIOM agency in late May, 55 percent of the respondents said they have noticed the positive results of the nationwide anti-corruption campaign; 25 percent said they cannot see the results of the campaign, and 13 percent said the situation with corruption is getting worse.

When asked what the most obvious result of the anti-corruption campaign is, 42 percent mentioned the arrests of senior officials. On the other hand, 47 percent described the high-profile cases as "show trials, settling of accounts between civil servants or conflicts between competing power groups."

Rome was neither built in a day and nor did it decline instantly. Italy has been crumbling over the last two decades under the weight of structural malfunction.

The fall reached precipitous levels in recent days with institutional gridlock and economic panic threatening another Europe-wide meltdown.

Since March, Italy lacked a government amid extreme uncertainty and confrontation between firebrand right-wing populists and their liberal opponents. Constitutional principles like the 'will of the majority' and 'checks and balances' wrestled with each other in a nerve-wracking contest of wills.

Notwithstanding a last-minute deal to finally stitch together a government, the saga has revealed deeper underlying maladies. Italy is on the frontline of a fissure gnawing at the heart of the contemporary Western world-­ nationalistic reassertion vis-à-vis supranational globalization.

When families can't take paid time off to care for a sick child, the social costs can be overwhelming.

When you're too sick to go to work, you shouldn't be punished for taking time to recover. That simple truth has driven many cities to enact paid leave policies in recent years, guaranteeing paid sick days, or some kind of paid medical- and family-leave time, as standard workplace policy. But those vital policies are still not available to everyone, which is having wide public-health ramifications: Working families most in need of paid time off are both disproportionately poor and more vulnerable to illness, and it costs everyone collectively an extraordinary amount of time and money.

The EU parliament will vote on Article 13 in less than a month. Article 13 will get rid of "fair use", will make platform operators liable for copyright infringements of its users (the only way to not be held accountable is implementing far-reaching censorship filters) and it even will introduce LICENSING FEES just for linking to other websites.

This is a transparent attempt to get rid of alternative information sources. It is an attempt to give power over the Internet to a handful of mega corporations and mainstream media. This is the desperate attempt of the failing EU to save their world order by openly authoritarian means. They don't even try to pretend otherwise, anymore.

Western media keeps referring to an alleged chemical attack on Douma, Syria, as an established fact, but have yet to produce one iota of evidence from the town that, until recently, was controlled by Jaysh al-Islam.

Unverified videos, emanating from the Western-funded propaganda construct the White Helmets, do not constitute evidence, nor do testimonies taken in Turkey or Idlib, Syria, which is under terrorist rule.

On the other hand, there are many testimonies that contradict the accusations, including those of 17 Syrians from Douma (among them doctors and medical staff), who, on April 26, spoke at the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague, stating that there was no chemical attack.

Google blamed "vandalism" at Wikipedia for inaccurate search results on their platform, which claimed the California GOP promotes Nazism, however Google failed to note that they prioritize results from Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information.

"We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that's what happened here," claimed Google in a statement. "This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate this process to remove the erroneous information."

Despite Google's efforts to shift the blame onto Wikipedia's often far-from-accurate information, Google prioritizes results from the site on their search engine, frequently placing Wikipedia information at the top of the page as an authoritative source.

I had been planning to write a post today about the latest report on Russia by the British House of Commons, but something came my way which is so out of the ordinary that it has to take precedence. The item in question is an article by University of Rhode Island professor Nicolai Petro entitled 'Are We Reading Russia Right?' and published in The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.

I urge you all to read the full text online here, and to spread it as far and wide as you can. But in case some of you only have time for a condensed version, below is a summary of what Nicolai has to say.

The article starts out by describing the extremely negative image of Russia painted by most Western commentators. This image, Petro says, is incomplete. There are indeed many shortcomings in Russia, but under Putin there has also been enormous progress. Focusing entirely on the former without mentioning the latter produces a thoroughly distorted picture.