The appetite for U.S. real estate continues to flourish, but international buyers are shifting their sights from luxury to less-pricey properties. This may be due to overall higher home prices, along with a stronger U.S. dollar, which both cost foreign buyers more at the negotiating table. There are also fewer nonresident foreigners investing in the market.

"Weaker economic growth throughout the world, devalued foreign currencies and financial market turbulence combined to present significant challenges for foreign buyers over the past year," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors (NAR). "While these obstacles led to a cool down in sales from nonresident foreign buyers, the purchases by recent immigrant foreigners rose, resulting in the overall sales dollar volume still being the second highest since 2009."

Foreign buyers purchased $102.6 billion of residential property in the U.S. between April 2015 and March 2016, according to NAR's annual report on international activity in U.S. real estate. That is a 1.3 percent decline in dollar volume from the previous survey. The number of properties purchased, however, rose 2.8 percent to 214,885. The value of homes bought by foreigners was typically higher than the median price of all U.S. homes.

Veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are calling for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to indict former Prime Minister Tony Blair for war crimes. They spoke to RT about their sense of "betrayal" over the Blair-era Iraq War.

At the Westminster rally to mark the publication of Sir John Chilcot's report, after a seven-year investigation into the 2003 Iraq conflict, military veterans told RT of their disgust at the circumstances surrounding the war.

Dan Taylor, 28, served in Iraq in the artillery. He is now a member of Veterans for Peace, a growing group of ex-services anti-war campaigners.

After reading aloud from the platform the names of five Iraqis and five UK soldiers killed in the war, Taylor told RT: "I think Corbyn will indict [Blair] and he needs to. The question is, is there support behind him to do it?"

He also said the Chilcot report must now be "torn to pieces. We need to look at what isn't said. I suspect it will be heavily redacted and it has taken far too long."

On Wednesday, Facebook made an announcement that you'd think would only matter to Facebook users and publishers: It will modify its News Feed algorithm to favor content posted by a user's friends and family over content posted by media outlets. The company said the move was not about privileging certain sources over others, but about better "connecting people and ideas."

But Richard Edelman, the head of the communications marketing firm Edelman, sees something more significant in the change: proof of a new "world of self-reference" that, once you notice it, helps explain everything from Donald Trump's appeal to Britain's vote to exit the European Union. Elites used to possess outsized influence and authority, Edelman notes, but now they only have a monopoly on authority. Influence largely rests with the broader population. People trust their peers much more than they trust their political leaders or news organizations.

For 16 years, Edelman's company has been surveying people around the world on their trust in various institutions. And one of the firm's findings is that people are especially likely these days to describe "a person like me"—a friend or, say, a Facebook friend—as a credible source of information. A "person like me" is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, Edelman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. "We have a reversal of traditional influence. It is going not top-down, but sideways."

This is part of a larger divide that has been opening up between "mass populations" and "informed publics" (Edelman defined the latter group as those who have a college degree, regularly consume news media, and are in the top 25 percent of household income for their age group in a given country). The 2008 financial crisis, he argued, produced widespread suspicion that elites only act in their own interests, not those of the people, and that elites don't necessarily have access to better information than the rest of the population does. The sluggish, unequal recovery from that crisis—the wealthy bouncing back while many others struggle with stagnant incomes—has only increased the skepticism.

"In too much of policing today, officer safety has become the highest priority. It trumps the rights and safety of suspects. It trumps the rights and safety of bystanders. It's so important, in fact, that an officer's subjective fear of a minor wound from a dog bite is enough to justify using potentially lethal force, in this case at the expense of a 4-year-old girl. And this isn't the first time.

In January, an Iowa cop shot and killed a woman by mistake while trying to kill her dog. Other cops have shot other kids, other bystanders, their partners, their supervisors and even themselves while firing their guns at a dog. That mind-set is then, of course, all the more problematic when it comes to using force against people."—Journalist Radley Balko

Almost two years after the firestorm that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, when a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager and militarized police descended in a brutal show of force to quell local protests, not much has really changed for the better.

Unarmed Americans are still getting shot by police with alarming regularity.

SWAT teams are still bursting through doors, terrorizing families and leaving lives and property shattered. In one incident, a Kansas SWAT team erroneously raided the home of two former CIA analysts after police observed family members shopping at a gardening store and found loose-leaf tea (mistaken for marijuana) in the family's trash can.

And the military industrial complex is still making a killing (literally and figuratively) at taxpayer expense from the transformation of small-town police forces—"kitted out with Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles"—into extensions of the military.

What has changed is the extent to which Americans—easily distracted by all of the political mumbo jumbo being bantered around—seem to have stopped paying attention or being outraged about revelations of government corruption, wrongdoing and outright abuse.

Part of this ignorance can be attributed to the failure of the mainstream media to report on what's really taking place in the American police state. As The Huffington Post reports, "The media has turned its sights to the heated presidential election, burning through the oxygen that had given life to stories about police brutality and reform."

Another part of this apathy can be chalked up to a widespread desensitization to police violence, thanks to the growing availability and accessibility of surveillance and camera footage. As Salon points out, "the increased visibility of trauma and death at the hands of cops" has resulted in "the deadening of our collective senses."

And yet another part of this indifference seemingly stems from the fact that we just don't value human life as much as we should. How many Americans seem unconcerned about the carnage inflicted on civilians worldwide as a result of the nation's bloody, endless wars abroad? As The Washington Post makes clear, the end result of ignoring these civilian casualties and burying memories of war's destruction is more wars, more blowback, and more innocent blood on our hands.

If there's one area where Americans do seem to still get outraged, it's in relation to their pets, who occupy a sizeable place in their hearts, homes and wallets.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev says that even though relations with Ankara are improving, no decision has been made to allow Turkish food imports to resume. Medvedev was responding to a group of Russian retailers who were hopeful products from Turkey would return to supermarkets within weeks. Opening a dialogue with Ankara does not mean "Russia has to immediately rush in with open arms," said the Prime Minister on Tuesday, adding that the issue is to be discussed with Turkish partners.

Russian retailers said they hope to quickly resume supplies and are preparing to renew agreements suspended when Russia introduced sanctions against Turkey last year. The sanctions were a response to the downing of a Russian jet in Syria last November resulting in the death of the pilot.

As summer sun sends temperatures soaring across much of the country, a federal judge has ordered the Lone Star State to stop giving poisonous drinking water to some of its most vulnerable prisoners.

On June 21, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison gave prison officials 15 days to replace the arsenic-laden water supply at the Wallace Pack Unit, a minimum security facility northwest of Houston that houses mostly elderly and chronically ill inmates. In his decision, Ellison said the tainted water "violates contemporary standards of decency."

"The Texas Department of Criminal Justice plans to appeal the ruling, according to a spokesman," The Houston Chronicle reported.

Today marks the five-year anniversary of Kelly Thomas' horrific and fatal beating by six Fullerton police officers. None of the officers that beat Thomas to death were ever convicted.

Video recordings of the assault captured the anguished screams of the helpless, unarmed, 160-pound man as he was slugged, kicked, tasered, and clubbed as the attackers bellowed, "Stop resisting!"

For those unfamiliar with the case, Kelly was an unarmed, schizophrenic, transient man, savagely beaten to death by officers Jay Cicinelli, Manuel Ramos, Joe Wolfe, Kenton Hampton, James Blatney, and Sergeant Kevin Craig.

The fateful incident began when Fullerton police were dispatched to Slidebar Rock-N-Roll Kitchen, under a false report that Thomas was breaking into cars. In reality, Thomas was only picking up cigarette butts that were littered on the ground.

Authorities in San Diego are searching for a man suspected of killing and burning homeless men in their sleep.

The burned body of one homeless man was found on Sunday in San Diego's Mission Bay neighborhood. The body was so badly charred that authorities could not determine whether he had suffered any trauma before being consumed by flames.

Witnesses say they saw a man running with a can of gasoline within two blocks of the crime.

Two more attacks occurred in different locations early Monday morning, according to the San Diego Police Department. One died after sustaining wounds to his upper torso in Robb Athletic Field, near a tennis court.

The other man was found with a stab wound near the city's Midway neighborhood, but he survived. He was taken to a local hospital, where he remains in a critical condition.

Police have released low-resolution images of the suspected killer from convenience store footage and urged the public to help them identify him. Witnesses described him as being between 40 and 50 years old, wearing a brown jacket or sweatshirt and a baseball cap, police said. He was carrying a backpack.

The shocking and graphic video of Baton Rouge police officers killing African-American Alton Sterling has sparked outrage across the country and protests in the streets of Louisiana's capital.

Sterling was shot dead while pinned to the ground by police. Officers say they were called to a convenience store after an anonymous caller claimed a man selling CDs had threatened him with a gun.

During the night of July 4th-5th in the city of Toretsk (formerly Dzerzhinsk) in the Donetsk region of Ukraine currently controlled by the UAF, a group of people barricaded the highway in an attempt to block the re-deployment of UAF military vehicles. Some sources report that the number of protesters was no more than 100 people, while others claim that their number was several times higher.

This event was reported by all Russian, Ukrainian, and many international media outlets, so I will not retell the generally known details. Instead, I will discuss the causes and possible consequences of this rebellion. The sources of my conclusions are media reports, information collected from Ukrainian social networks, and information obtained from my friends in the cities of Ukrainian-controlled Donbass.

The first and main conclusion to be drawn is that the population of Donbass hates the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian occupational troops. On May 11th, 2014, a referendum was held in the cities of Donbass in which the majority of residents voted for seceding from Ukraine and forming the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics. The results of this referendum were violated by the Ukrainian authorities. In addition, many of these cities were subjected to shelling by Ukrainian "liberation" troops while the inhabitants of these cities, including the people of Toretsk, await the arrival of the liberation army of the DPR. This is a reality...

The second conclusion is that active members of the Russian uprising in Donbass are either in the DPR or LPR or have been arrested by the SBU (the Ukrainian analogue of the Gestapo). The least passionate supporters of the Russian World, or simply apolitical people are the ones who have stayed behind in Ukrainian Donbass. Thus, any rebellion in Donbass will be spontaneous. Its reason will not be political goals, but some kind of social impulse. This is what happened last spring in Konstantinovka when a spontaneous rebellion erupted against Ukrainian troops who shot dead a young mother and her child in a stroller. It is likely that the events in Toretsk have been caused by a similar event.