Russia tops the list of countries with the highest number of female board members, says a new report by a US-based audit firm. While Baltic states show similar stats, in G7 countries some 40 percent of businesses have no women in senior positions at all.

The new report titled Women in Business was published by the firm Grant Thornton on Tuesday. It conducted its research by carrying out surveys at over 5,000 businesses in 36 countries.

In Russia, 45 percent of senior management positions are held by women, according to the report. Japan ranks lowest with only 7 percent of business executive roles held by females.

On a global scale, women are said to hold only a quarter of senior management positions. The issue of male-domination in senior management has long been on the minds of companies.

"Companies across developed nations have talked the talk on diversity in leadership for long enough," Francesca Lagerberg, a global leader for tax services at Grant Thornton International, said in a statement. "It's time to put their promises into practice and deliver results," she added.

In the US and UK, the percentage of senior positions held by women stands at 23 and 21 percent, respectively. "This poor performance seems to be at least partly a result of entrenched societal norms. In the UK and US in particular, there are still plentiful examples of a 'command and control' approach to leadership, which is not necessarily attractive to women," Francesca Lagerberg said.

The percentage of businesses today that do not have any women in senior management at all stands at 33 percent, compared to 32 percent in 2015. Unlike Eastern European countries (such as Estonia, Latvia and Poland), in which over a third of senior positions are held by women, G7 members (Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Britain and the United States) had no women in senior roles in 39 percent of the cases surveyed.

The 20th century was the century of ideologies and destruction. Communism entered the stage in 1917 and died almost immediately, fascism too disappeared within the concentration camps, a dozen years after its first implementation.

After the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a single ideology was left, centered in the US empire and affecting the whole world: liberalism along with its corollary dogmas like individualism, materialism, atheism, and nihilism, have brought humanity to the brink of oblivion.

Despite their obvious pro imperial bias, every day the mainstream media provides additional proof of the utter disaster that is going on around our planet and the ongoing disintegration of individuals and societies.

In previous articles I repeatedly wrote about the nefarious effects of liberalism spread by the US empire: the destruction of beauty, family, gender, identity, moral consciousness, religions, and so forth. Basically, all the features that define our very identity as humans are being systematically twisted, reversed, destroyed.

While it's a necessary exercise to be fully aware of the inanity of imperialism, it remains incomplete. To paraphrase Albert Camus, the revolted man says 'no' to the existing world but he also says yes to something else, to a better world. So, the next natural step is to propose an alternative: a new political and social model that deeply resonates with the human values we all must embrace.

This is an exercise of thought and also an exercise of hope, and there's not much to lose, because no matter how imperfect this sociopolitical model is, it's unlikely to be as destructive as its predecessors, no matter how hard we try!

The idea to write this article came from a discussion on our forum titled "Hope, fear, and the future". One of Joe Quinn's contributions in this thread brought to light a key point:

Life is about growth, but what is "life" if not the relationships we have with other people, and therefore what is growth in life but the growth of our relationships with others. But growth in what way? A combining perhaps, of those formerly unique private worlds, into something greater than the sum of the parts, something that can create or attract a new life or world by the concentration and communalization of those private realities that in themselves do not have the strength or power to do so. In addition, of course, this process would have to involve not just a shared view of reality, but rather one that resonates with an objective reality, or with the greater forces of nature aka broad-scale objective reality creation.

This idea grew further while reading Alexander Dugin's excellent work: "The fourth political theory". There are several similarities between both models. But, unlike Dugin who proposes a strategy to transition from the current liberal world to his fourth political model, we solely focus here on the specifics of our ideal world after transition. That's why our model is called "postimperialism".

Our hypothesis is that the US empire will soon collapse and may bring with it most of the planet. This global catastrophe may be due to intervention of the human and/or cosmic variety. Postimperialism proposes a model of society that could flourish after this major reset.

So the task at hand was no less than figuring out the organization of an ideal society. All I could come up with was a rather naive image similar to Bilbo's village in Lord of the Rings. I was certainly aware of many shortcomings of the current system but what were the best ways to remedy it? So, as usual, sitting around the kitchen table, I began to ask about this or that point and others would suggest solutions.

I was surprised to see how much thought all of us had already given to this topic, and how much extra thinking we gave during those conversations. It suggests that indeed there's a deep craving in all of us for a better world, and that it goes beyond a mere unrealistic dream. Indeed, you will find below many very operational and concrete ideas that are definitely worth testing.

So this is the way we came up with the features of our ideal society. This is, by definition, an incomplete work that must evolve in an organic way. It's a first step aimed at planting a seed in the reader's mind and encouraging him/her to think about this ideal world. And let's face it: every great (and not-so great) achievement in this world started with an idea, a flash of imagination or inspiration that informed the process that became the foundation of its realization.

Islamic State jihadists use children, trained as soldiers, executioners and suicide bombers from an early age, to become "more lethal fighters than themselves," a major study has warned. The terrorist group is using Nazi regime tactics.

The organization focuses a large number of its efforts on indoctrinating children through an extremism-based education curriculum, and fostering them to become future terrorists. The current generation of fighters sees these children as better and more lethal fighters than themselves, because rather than being converted into radical ideologies they have been indoctrinated into these extreme values from birth, or a very young age," researchers for Quilliam, a London-based counter-extremism think tank, stated in the report, according to the Guardian.

Human remains have been discovered stacked in barrels filled with acid in a rural area of Puebla State, Mexico, according to the local prosecutor's office. The remains appear to belong to at least three people.

The police discovered 10 barrels and nine bags of human remains, which could belong to at least three people, one of them a man in his 50s.

"It's likely more than three people, we still need to study the contents of the bags," a Puebla prosecution source told AFP on Saturday. The finding was made on Thursday after an anonymous phone tip, the same source said.

The prosecutor's office believes the case might be connected with a shooting in Cuautlancingo that broke out in an illegal cockfight den on Tuesday.

The first batch of mercenaries from the private US military firm DynCorp has arrived in the Yemeni city of Aden to replace paid militants from another American company.

Under a USD-3-billion contract between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and DynCorp, mercenaries from the company are to be deployed to Yemen, where UAE forces are fighting against the Yemeni army and Popular Committees on Saudi orders, Khabar News Agency quoted an official with Yemeni Defense Ministry as saying.

Nearly half of Jewish Israelis agree that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, a recent survey on religion and politics in the country shows. The poll also shows both Israeli Jews and Arabs are gradually giving up on the two-state solution.

As many as 48 percent of Israeli Jews favor expulsion or transfer of Arabs from Israel, where they constitute 19 percent of the total population, amounting to 8.4 million people, the survey conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Center and published on Tuesday demonstrates.

Among the supporters of the Arabs' expulsion from Israel, 21 percent "strongly agree" with the statement that "Arabs should be expelled or transferred" from the country and 27 percent "mostly agree" with it.

At the same time, roughly the same percentage of Jewish Israelis, or 46 percent, oppose such measures, the poll shows.

The potential expulsion of Arabs is advocated by most ultra-orthodox and religious Jews as well as by more than half of traditionalist Jews, while most secular Jews oppose it. Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin - many of whom have ancestors who were expelled from their countries of origin - also tend to be more in favor of such a decision than Jews that came to Israel from Europe.

The wording of the question about Arab expulsion was criticized by the Israel Prize laureate Sammy Smooha, a professor of sociology at the University of Haifa. Speaking to Haaretz newspaper, he called the question "misleading" and stressed that it does not specify whether it applies to all Arabs living in Israel or only West Bank residents, who are "not Israeli citizens per se," or only those that support the country's enemies.

The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do

Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity's future. In The Iron Heel(1908), the American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy corporate titans - the 'oligarchs' - kept the masses at bay with a brutal combination of rewards and punishments. Much of humanity lived in virtual slavery, while the fortunate ones were bought off with decent wages that allowed them to live comfortably - but without any real control over their lives.

In We (1924), the brilliant Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, anticipating the excesses of the emerging Soviet Union, envisioned a world in which people were kept in check through pervasive monitoring. The walls of their homes were made of clear glass, so everything they did could be observed. They were allowed to lower their shades an hour a day to have sex, but both the rendezvous time and the lover had to be registered first with the state.

In Brave New World (1932), the British author Aldous Huxley pictured a near-perfect society in which unhappiness and aggression had been engineered out of humanity through a combination of genetic engineering and psychological conditioning. And in the much darker novel 1984 (1949), Huxley's compatriot George Orwell described a society in which thought itself was controlled; in Orwell's world, children were taught to use a simplified form of English called Newspeak in order to assure that they could never express ideas that were dangerous to society.

These are all fictional tales, to be sure, and in each the leaders who held the power used conspicuous forms of control that at least a few people actively resisted and occasionally overcame. But in the non-fiction bestseller The Hidden Persuaders (1957) - recently released in a 50th-anniversary edition - the American journalist Vance Packard described a 'strange and rather exotic' type of influence that was rapidly emerging in the United States and that was, in a way, more threatening than the fictional types of control pictured in the novels. According to Packard, US corporate executives and politicians were beginning to use subtle and, in many cases, completely undetectable methods to change people's thinking, emotions and behaviour based on insights from psychiatry and the social sciences.

As Florida Power & Light finalized plans to expand its nuclear reactors at Turkey Point three years ago, critics were aghast. The nuclear plant already stands on environmentally fragile land, and upping the power production would seriously threaten the ecosystem, they argued.

Turns out they may have been right. This morning, the county released the results of a study into whether Turkey Point has been leaking dangerous wastewater into Biscayne Bay. County water monitors found more than 200 times the normal levels of tritium, a radioactive isotope linked to nuclear power production, in the bay water, a finding environmentalists say justifies their concerns.

"This is one of several things we were very worried about," says South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard, who is also a biological sciences professor at Florida International University. "You would have to work hard to find a worse place to put a nuclear plant, right between two national parks and subject to hurricanes and storm surge."

The study is just the latest blow to FPL, which lost a state court ruling last month when a judge found the utility had failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of gallons of wastewater from seeping into the bay.

County commissioners and other local politicians are scrambling this morning to get answers about how threatened Biscayne Bay is by the leakage.

The post-9/11 stat that you're more likely to die in a car crash than a terrorist attack became horribly clear this weekend when Boston bombing survivor Victoria McGrath died in a sports car crash in Dubai.

Nearly three years after suffering shrapnel wounds to the leg from the first of two bombs, McGrath, 23, was killed along with three others after their rented Ferrari 458 Spider slammed into a pole.

The car was said to be going close to 90 mph in a 25 mph zone when it crashed, breaking the car in two on impact.

A look into the origins of the pledge of allegiance - mandatory regurgitation for school children - reveals that it was actually created by a magazine in 1892 in order to sell flags to schools, and the pledge was created by Francis Bellamy to create a reason for schools to buy the flags.

In turn, this social ritual creates cohesion and unity in the mind of the public with the federal government.

Until it was changed in the 1940s, the salute was actually a military salute wherein children then "hailed" the flag in a fashion very similar to what was done in Nazi Germany. American children were instead trained to put their hand over their hearts... and the phrase "under God" wasn't added until 1954 in the Eisenhower Administration - controlled from the shadows by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen.